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A LOVER OF THE CIL\IR 



A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 



BY 

SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS 




BOSTON 

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

MDCCCCXIX 






COPYRIGHT' I 9 I 9 
BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 



THE'PLIMPTON'PBESS 
NOEWOOD-MASS'U'S'A 



©CI.A559177 

OEC 111919 



To 
PROSSER HALL FRYE 



PREFACE 

WHAT I have tried to treat with consistent 
seriousness in these essays is the point of view 
of the central figure, whose outlook was intended to 
give to the series some measure of continuity and 
singleness of purpose. A fling at the spirit of one's 
age is not to be indulged in lightly, though it may, I 
hope, be undertaken with good humor. That, at all 
events, was the point of view of the Lover of the 

Chair. 

S. B. G. 

June 2S, igig 



vii 



CONTENTS 
PART ONE 

PAGE 

I. A Lover of the Chair i 

II. Chair and Saddle 28 

III. A Liberal Experience 43 

IV. A Modern Paradox 90 

V. In Pursuit of the Arts 142 

I. CUDGELS and COMMON SENSE . . 1 43 
II. SENSE AND THE SOUL . . . .153 

III. ART AND THE REASONERS . . . 1 67 

IV. MADAME's TASTE 1 79 

PART TWO 

I. Poor Richard 209 

II. The Awkward Age 232 

III. PSEUDODOXIA EpIDEMICA 255 

IV. In Quest of the Center 272 



IX 



A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 



A Lover of the Chair 

I 

A LOVER OF THE CHAIR 

ONCE over the border of a stormy youth — the 
wrong border, alas, he was none the less in- 
clined to say — he felt a curious serenity of spirit, 
which gave him for a brief searching birthday a dis- 
turbing qualm. It came over him suddenly that his 
present restful content was the sign of approaching 
age. He was concerned that he was not more con- 
cerned about certain losses that those storms had 
involved him in — certain shores that they had 
beaten him back from. They had driven him far 
enough about, sometimes into ports he had little 
pride in remembering. But he was out of it now, 
he told himself. His youth was over, he was as he 
was, and there was nothing for it but to take him- 
self so. He could settle back upon an ironic survey 
of life and find a pleasant spice in his aloof con- 
tentment. 

Whatever the quality of his aloofness, his irony 
was real enough to flash back upon himself; and 
presently he found it smiling with the perception that 
his losses were being accorded more than a scornful 
hearing, and being dismissed with but a feminine no. 
The occasional flashes of old moods that now after 
a long period came back upon him were making him 



2 A Lover of the Chair 

linger over the sense that there were starry parts of 
the common life that had slipped by him and left 
him untouched. He had the spirit, however, to 
combat his regrets, and he settled back not uncom- 
fortably upon the serenity of his new-found leisure. 

He had the materials for contentment. There 
were inbred habits of simplicity, and the thrill of 
adventure in expenditure that are essential to wring- 
ing luxury from any income, and can wring it from 
any; and a taste that could find its pleasure in 
lining his study with books and brooding among 
them buried in one and at arm's length from the rest. 
He had toned his library with the deep oranges and 
browns that bound his present to certain serene 
years of his childhood and overleaped the interval 
of troubled youth. There was enough of an income 
to give him travel when he cared for it. There was, 
perhaps above all, the rich heritage of an improvi- 
dent family — an unconcern for a possible rainy 
day. Add to all this a habit of detachment that 
left him free to meet the present humor for humor 
and his equipment for content was reasonably com- 
plete. 

He had indeed some mental reservations as to 
this humor of his. He knew that it had little out- 
ward wit to match the subtlety of his inner percep- 
tions of the foibles and inconsistencies of his own 
and others' dancing to the spasmodic tune of life. 
And he saw in this lack of explicit wit the explana- 
tion of a characteristic of his — the fewness and in- 
tensity of his friendships. For with perhaps less 
than the normal ability to flash out the quality of 
his perceptions, he could reveal himself only to the 



A Lover of the Chair 3 

rare and old acquaintances whose outlook was 
enough like his own to make a word or an allusion 
carry the quality of his thought. With more ex- 
pressiveness he could have won a more universal 
response, and would have been no doubt content with 
less delicately appreciative ears. As it was, he put 
a value upon the friends he had that was the greater 
for their necessarily deeper thrust. 

It was the quality of his humor, however, that 
it could be amused at his own foibles, and thus, as 
he could smile to observe, it was rarely likely to be 
graveled for matter. It served, at least, its inner 
purpose with him in keeping his temper unsoured, 
in relieving the somberness of reflection, and of 
keeping him amused at the spectacle of a life that 
seemed to him none too heartening in itself. 

All in all he prized the fortune that had brought 
him to his present station. It gave him a compe- 
tence with leisure, work that he could look upon as 
of decent importance, and an attitude to life that 
commanded as well as permitted his indulgence in 
the kind of exercise for which leisure is the con- 
venient term. 

He paid for this fortune, indeed, by a seclusion 
that at moments, in late afternoons when the sun 
fell warmly upon the deepening colors of his li- 
brary, or in winter when the lights were lit before 
the dinner hour called him away to bleak boarding 
houses — a seclusion that at such moments mounted 
to a poignant loneliness. Tactful suggestions had 
come to him from time to time that there was a 
common mode of relief from such a state. But he 
had what comfort there was in the reflection that 



4 A Lover of the Chair 

this normal escape from loneHness was prohibited 
as much by the meagerness of his income as by its 
incompatibility with the humorous detachment that 
he so prized. The soldier, the priest, and the scholar 
— he knew the ancient wisdom. 

He had an amused outlook about him over the 
devastations that this escape had entailed upon some 
of his colleagues — the addition of domestic duties 
that were sometimes more than Omphalean in their 
indignity, the addition of domestic membership that 
promised crying distractions for years to come, the 
addition of expenses that superinduced pot-boiling 
and politics — the entrance of the personal equation 
destructive of scholarly calm and productive of the 
multiplex irrelevant motives that made futile so 
much of the life about him. 

He knew, indeed, that he was open to the charge 
of selfishness, and he squirmed at the accusation. 
For he had the sentiment to be touched and won by 
the spectacle that took place courageously, now 
among his friends and now more remotely in some 
romance that fell under his eye, of a brave launch- 
ing out into the double struggle. But he knew that 
the life that he proposed to himself was not to be 
one of ease, and that however poor a performer he 
was to be, it was, generically, to be performed the 
better alone. 

As for the lyric aspect of the matter he had his 
reserves there too; and though he could smile at a 
touch of pedantry in his necessarily aloof point of 
view, he had the rational assurance of common 
sense that the aloof point of view was probably the 
saner — that the mad themselves were not the best 



A Lover of the Chair S 

judges of madness. His own observations had made 
him suspect a certain sentimental falseness in the 
reputed attitude of all the world toward the concrete 
instance of the malady — certainly of the masculine 
part of it at all events. The instinct to hide the 
emotion, increasingly strong the richer the nature, 
rather suggested the older classic view of love as a 
sickness to be suffered in patience, a walking fever 
to be endured in as much silence as a resolute manli- 
ness could command — not a thing to be courted 
and fostered. And as he looked back upon a cen- 
tury that in its literature and in its current interpre- 
tation of life had lifted love to the highest place, he 
was struck with the spectacle of an almost unprece- 
dented bankruptcy. The age that had apotheosized 
love was ending vulgarly as an age of divorce. 

For all his smiles, and his perceptions, and his 
rationalizations, however, the sense that his youth 
had slipped by, often in futile experiences that he 
might better have missed altogether, and that he 
had missed this one experience, was a matter of 
underlying regret. However much a malady it might 
be, and however bitter its endurance, still it was too 
universally human to let him be normal in so wholly 
escaping it. His understanding of life was by so 
much the less complete, for though he had felt the 
vicarious passions of literature, he knew enough of 
the comparative paleness of literature even at its 
best to realize its insufficiency alone. And there 
was too, in his exemption, the lurking suspicion of 
something deficient in his own make-up, a suspicion 
more disconcerting than the mere escape from the 
external experience. 



6 A Lover of the Chair 

It was therefore with a curiously complex con- 
sciousness that he found himself, after a slow in- 
duction, wholly enmeshed. He had at first a more 
than ordinarily objective view of his own impulses, 
and a perception that found some of its actual en- 
joyment in the spectacle of his own foible. He had 
a rational idea of the place of this passion in the 
half-conflicting, half-cooperating schemes of nature 
on the one hand and humanity on the other. But 
presently this idea began to change its proportions. 
His freedom began to seem less supremely desirable. 
The malady began to seem an unwonted state of 
health. He had once told himself that he had all the 
wisdom about love except a knowledge of the thing 
itself; and now he had a sudden sense of the vanity 
of this wisdom. He caught his own downward drift, 
and warned himself in amusement how desperately 
he would have to cling to his pale wisdom to keep 
him, in his inexperience, from a more than common 
donning of the motley. 

In the beginning, before he had ceased to spend 
certain moments in his aloof conning tower, he was 
whimsically dismayed at his plight, and at rebellious 
rejoicings within him that the springs of his sensi- 
bilities were not dried up. He had recently had an- 
other experience that- had thrilled him with a paral- 
lel though necessarily paler satisfaction — he had 
been for the first time in Italy. He might have 
learned from that that his sentiment was still quite 
capable of tears. 

He had gone reluctantly, and with misgivings, for 
Italy had been the Arcadia of his dreams, and he 
had known, in other spots less tenderly cherished 



A Lover of the Chair 7 

but still looked forward to with hope, the chill of 
disillusionment on the spots themselves. He had 
paid before the penalty of too vivid a prefiguring and 
too keen an anticipation. Even Paris, wrapped in 
its magic past, and appealing, through a hundred 
avenues of approach, to his idea, composite of scenes 
and personages and dreams and hopes and accom- 
plishments of the luminous moments of many cen- 
turies — even Paris itself in the reality had stood 
between him and his vision. He had indeed, in 
repeated visits, learned to see, beneath the cloak of 
its modern instantaneity, the Paris of his idea — 
even to see in the cloak itself, with its stains and 
its dinginess of daily wear, something of the eternal 
vitality which scorned his too aesthetic demand that 
it be laid away for him in lavender. None the less 
he had had to let custom stale and obliterate much 
of the ephemeral before the real Paris had emerged; 
and by then the first thrill of perception had passed 
— passed into something more substantial no doubt, 
but too completely passed ever to command a per- 
fect moment of rapture. 

He had thrust off Italy, therefore, into the vague 
future, hesitant to put it to the touch. It was for 
him a state of mind peculiarly luminous, a clear and 
simple vision to which he had clung with whimsical 
hope, a bright limbo of soft skies, an aged earth still 
fresh with verdure, hillsides terraced and vine-clad, 
molded by ages of cultivation, ruins crumbling back 
into the welcoming soil, old gardens with marble 
balustrades and statues mellowing to their ancient 
kinship with the earth, a people himiane of the 
South, looking at him through eyes saddened with 



8 A Lover of the Chair 

the reminiscence of old centuries — a land where 
human experience had risen to the highest and left 
its mark deepcut but harmonious upon a still domi- 
nant nature. And he had wanted to save this lu- 
minous corner of his mind from the disappointing 
touch of reality, fearful lest he, unlike those others 
whose susceptibility still kept their spirits fresh, 
should prove his lyric vein grown dry with the prose 
of his reason. 

When he did enter upon it, it was almost by acci- 
dent. He had come afoot, with staff and pack and 
a good companion, from the homely Tyrol, Teutonic 
in its gross beverages, its broken-kneed crucifixes, 
its flesh, its comfort, its frank coarseness. And he 
found himself, after a loitering week, at the head of 
the Engadin. Forgetting to be charmed he had been 
charmed, in a lingering sunset after a day of storm, 
by the beauty of the Silser See, cloud mass and 
mountain mass in the sunset towering upward and 
downward from its clear surface. The emotion of 
the moment had broken the intransigence of his 
resolve; and in the waywardness of his travel it was 
an added adventure to decide in the whim of a mo- 
ment's desire to turn toward Italy instead of back- 
ward to the North. 

The point of their decision, when they came to 
the real moment of divergence, embodied itself pro- 
phetically in the view that stretched behind and be- 
fore them on the next morning from the top of the 
pass. Behind, in the valley of the Inn, the lake, the 
mountains, the whole region of their Teutonic pil- 
grimage, and in their minds the whole past of their 
Teutonic reminiscences, lay in heavy fog, obscure, 



A Lover of the Chair 9 

forbidding, chilling. And before them, down the 
long defile of the Val Bregaglia, the uplifting snowy 
peaks, the green lower slopes, the winding thread of 
the stream strung with gleaming villages, lay warm 
in the sunshine beneath a clear, hopeful sky drifting 
with headlong clouds. The spell fell upon them 
there, and they knew it, and it still held them. 

They had indeed but a touch of Italy, but they 
had it on the intimate terms of the foot traveler. 
Their knapsacks, that elsewhere had been the in- 
signia of leisure, here seemed to put them in friendly 
touch with the workaday life of the valley — with a 
similarly harnessed population, men and women, 
children of ten and age-bent elders, hewers of wood 
and drawers of water, hay-harvesters and peddlers 
— many a gay-tongued Autolycus, and one young 
girl, wearied and resting by her pack, whose face 
long afterwards haunted them with its sadness and 
its beauty. It was indeed the inveterate world of 
their old knowledge, a world of hard toil, of meager 
rewards, of a life hard-wrung from a reluctant earth. 
But it was a world transmuted. Its thousand times 
repeated Buon giorno, Buona sera, from singing 
children and from warped and wrinkled age, touched 
their common humanity; and the earth itself, in- 
stinct with the accumulated life of all their tradi- 
tions and all their civilization, spoke to them on 
every hand no less tenderly and no less humanly. 

They knew afterwards how merely scenically they 
had taken their first day as they plodded down the 
long incline of the valley — the white villages 
crowded upon the narrow cobbled street, the drowsy 
tinkle of the scythe sharpeners seated by the open 



10 A Lover of the Chair 

doors, the hamlets high up the mountainsides — 
houses huddled like sheep around their shepherd 
churches — other hamlets still higher up on slopes 
that seemed inaccessible, and higher yet still other 
hamlets to the very edge of the summer snows — 
terraces of vines, terraces of short hay under the 
low branches of chestnut groves — deep shady vistas 
where the scythe and the bent mower forever reaped 
the scant harvest — wayside shrines that harbored 
here no broken-kneed Christs, but where the tender 
Virgin won an unremitting homage of simple flowers 
— stretches of old Roman roadway, and medieval 
ruins, and the swarming albergo, there at once side 
by side without clash, harmonious, in the presence 
of a life so simple and so unaltering that Virgil and 
St. Francis might have passed that way with them 
unshocked by change. 

They had taken it all with the objective, welcom- 
ing eyes of travelers; but they had been moved, and 
the spell of Italy, drawing from their sense of the 
past and their vision of the present, had fallen upon 
them and taken them captive. For one of these 
travelers, at least, with his fears and his hopes, the 
pilgrimage was doubly endeared. He was exultant 
that the springs of his sensibilities were not wholly 
dried up; and he found himself dangerously making 
an attempt to adjust more leniently within him the 
momentous proportions of his reason and his heart. 

So that now, when he saw himself ensnared in a 
new and deeper emotion, he was complexly but the 
more guarded against its mastery as he found him- 
self the more inclined to indulge and test the new 
depths of his spontaneity. His conscious dualism 



A Lover of the Chair ii 

never left him, however — never so wholly that he 
could think of himself, after the manner of the 
world's beloved, as foregoing principles, ambitions, 
and native tastes as the price of attainment. And 
he kept, even in the moments of stress, enough of his 
objective humor to detect and smile back the un- 
conscious egotisms of the lover in him. 

He would have doubted, indeed, the probability of 
his being really in love had there not come upon him 
a vivid light that had never before illuminated his 
perceptions even in imagination, even in moments 
of transcendent emotion. Long ago he had had di- 
verse experiences that had set him ruminating on his 
attachment to life. He had come near enough to 
death more than once in perils by sea and land to 
know that his physical clinging to life was a dif- 
ferent thing from his conscious sense of attachment 
to it. As for his conscious attachment, his ultimate 
findings came to him, as he might have anticipated, 
not out of his reason but out of experience and an 
intuition sensitive to the subtle imagery of emotion. 

One of the friends who had given to his college 
life the principal value that it had had for him, and 
who had shared with him a year of prodigal wander- 
ings, had afterwards gone away in search of health, 
and then died. For five or six vital years they had 
been together, conscious together of what had been 
significant to each, filled with common tastes, often 
differing in opinion, but with a common vocabulary 
and a common understanding — phrases that meant 
philosophies, gestures that meant attitudes to life, 
smiles that summarized old experiences and old 
readings, a rapport that included the whole of the 



12 A Lover of the Chair 

structure that each in that period had built, in his 
consciousness, of life as he knew it. 

In the bleak period that had followed the first 
departure, he had wandered through the empty 
rooms of that house of friendship desolately enough, 
yet forlornly comforted with the sense that still, 
though from a distance and with only a word now 
and then to break the loneliness, his habitation there 
was still shared. Hope kept those rooms habitable 
for lingering months. But when the end came, and 
the first hot grief had burnt to ashes, he knew that 
death had forever locked those doors. No one else 
could enter there, and the part they had built to- 
gether, detail by detail, he himself could never live 
in again. New parts he could build, he knew, if he 
should have the heart, but the years of his old build- 
ing were gone, and the completed structure of his 
life would forever be the less for the closing of those 
silent chambers. 

It was the way of life, he knew. And in the deso- 
late reflections that followed he knew that the con- 
scious attachment to life lay, negatively, in an 
escape from an utter detachment, from isolation; 
and positively, in a sense that the intangible struc- 
ture of life as he grasped it was shared with someone 
whose sympathy and understanding could confirm 
it, and rescue it from the haunting suspicion of 
nothingness. 

He had secluded himself for a time, disheartened. 
To begin anew, to build again, was more than he 
could bring himself to at once. He had no wish for 
other friends. He found indeed that it was not in 
him to hunt them out, to choose and cultivate them. 



A Lover of the Chair 13 

His turn of mind, the quality of his appreciations, 
made a demand upon circumstances that if he have 
friendship it must grow organically from the process 
of life. Nothing else could produce what he under- 
stood by that term. He had no care for casual ac- 
quaintance. He had, however, the solace that comes 
nearest to friendship — he had books; and with 
them he spent his time for a year or two. And then 
he found, growing out of the new life he had made 
for himself, the beginning of new friendships. Liv- 
ing again had zest for him. This led him into franker 
and fuller associations, and these in turn to his curi- 
ously eventless romance. 

The girl who fanned the sudden flame in him was, 
he knew at once, disconcertingly unlike the type of 
women who in lonely moments had peopled his 
fancy. They had been calm-mannered and friendly, 
vital but contained. They had not been clever, per- 
haps, but had grown up with ripe traditions into 
whose ways they had richly fallen. In their pleasant 
and wholesome benevolence they had been, above 
all, restful and serene, with a frank and tender 
humor, a refuge from life and from a troubled spirit. 

The girl herself was wholly otherwise. He first 
met her in the drawing room of acquaintances 
whither he had gone to make a rare call. There was 
a silence when he entered, not embarrassed but in- 
tense, as though he had come upon a moment of 
strong feeling in which, though he took no part, his 
presence struck no discordant note. He was intro- 
duced to her then, simply; and in the high tension 
of her clear regard, in her elevation above the com- 
monplace, he caught a wistful appeal in her inquir- 



14 A Lover of the Chair 

ing eyes. He did not know to what impassioned 
question he was responding or to what doctrine he 
was assenting. He only saw her there, very young 
and very slender and very erect, her head quiveringly 
high, her eyes burning with indignant wonder, her 
color very pure and heightened with emotion, and 
her thoughts lifted above the conventions of the 
moment. His blood leapt, without asking leave and 
without giving reasons. 

He had no word with her then, except her look 
of baffled inquiry too impersonal he thought to have 
distinguished him; and yet in his unchallenged ad- 
mission into the circle of her feelings he nourished 
a hopeful interpretation against the waiting smile of 
his later reflections. He put off impatiently the 
mocking intrusion of those reflections, and listened, 
when she had gone quietly and without apology from 
the room, to the explanations of his friends. She 
had been reading, they said with a lightness that 
had no flippancy, some of those modern writers who 
had discovered that life was hard, and harder for 
some than for others. And she had gone out to see 
for herself. What she had looked for had not been 
hard to find, real and heart-rending. At the end 
of her endurance she had come upon a pitiful case 
of ejection, squalid household goods crying their 
shame at the curbstone, a drunken father, a sad, 
starved mother nursing a baby at her flat breast, and 
half-clad, dirty children shivering about her. It was 
a typical case, they said, as they sat in the comfort- 
able drawing room before the blazing fire; and they 
looked at each other wretchedly and in silence, 
moved by the pure young sympathies of the girl, her 



A Lover of the Chair 15 

generous indignation, the revival of old feelings and 
old problems, and the reminder of old wounds that 
had never healed. 

He went away troubled, his quickened pulse at 
the thought of the clear generous eyes of the girl 
rebuked by the unselfish wistfulness of her emotion. 
His mind moved along sudden unwonted paths. 
Bright visions flashed out upon him. But he told 
himself pityingly that he was too old. He had 
struggled with the horror of that experience that 
had now so suddenly blighted the joy of her normal 
girlhood, and he had come out of the struggle, not 
on the side of youth and hope and ardor and gen- 
erosity, and of confidence that he could take the 
world in his two eager hands and shape it anew in 
some less hateful mold. He had come out, alas, on 
the side of middle age, less hopeful, less eager, in 
the measure of his despair; and now as he looked 
back on the years since his Utopia had faded for 
him, he knew that in the vision of ardent youth, with 
the sight of the world's misery before its eyes, he 
must be accounted by so much the less generous. 
He was spending his years among books, in the 
pleasant warmth of his study, shut off from the 
sight of suffering in the elegant pursuit of learning, 
or looking at it in strange foreign cities, in Italian 
countrysides, in gaunt fishing villages on desolate 
French coasts, with the curious, objective, aloof, 
picture-hunting eyes of the traveler. With the 
friends he had left but now he had talked of this 
problem, trying against the incessant pressure of the 
age to keep clear the point of view that he had 
gained. He knew that whatever the evils of life, 



1 6 A Lover of the Chair 

not sympathy alone could better them; that learn- 
ing and thought must have their silent place in the 
regenerative forces that should bring about a bet- 
ter future. And he had committed himself to the 
latter forces. 

He went away from his friends glooming among 
his own reflections. His humor deserted him. The 
little personal charities that he had sneakingly 
maintained against the wisdom of his organizing age 
suddenly looked paltry and feeble in the face of 
that sweeping grasp which the young hopes of the 
new generation seemed to have attained. They 
rose up and mocked him. And when at the door of 
his own chambers he passed the humble figure of 
an old pensioner of his, he strode in without a 
smile of recognition and slammed the door. He was 
down with the malady. 

Seated by his window he looked afresh at the 
problem from the point of view he had won in his 
old wrestling with it. Surely for that less cruel 
future toward which the present was aiming there 
must be saved what good things had been accumu- 
lated in the past; old traditions must go on, the love 
of art, the love of books, the love of wisdom; the 
human chain must remain unbroken; the torch must 
be kept alight and handed on. 

How trite it all sounded! To what feeble phrases, 
now suddenly, he was reduced, as he came again to 
view the problem from the ardent angle of youth and 
generosity, and illusion, and hope! He saw it all 
anew out of the dreaming eyes of girlhood — and it 
struck him how drab and wintry were the colors of 
his own vision. His own vision assumed all at once 



A Lover of the Chair 17 

a dwindling remoteness. It lacked the warm, heart- 
ening touch of immediacy, the quickening contact of 
life. He seemed to be trying, from aloof, and with 
averted eyes, to do what only a direct vision and 
courageous bodily presence could hope to do. And 
he saw embodied in this girl the spirit of a new age, 
with eyes open, with quick sympathy, touching the 
wound with its own hands, devoting itself to the heal- 
ing service. Every instinct in him tugged at his 
assent to this call of life. 

He sat on in his window, ruminating in gloomy 
rebellion. Why he should thus twist the fancies that 
a fair face had set free in him into a grotesque pic- 
ture of despair he had not, for the hour, the humor 
even to question. It was indeed a rebellion against 
growing up, a crying out against the years, an old 
ember of his youth that had not gone out, glowing 
through the ashes it had been buried among. But 
he had lost his detachment, his perspective, his 
humor; and the particular circumsta.nce of the mo- 
ment absorbed and embodied the universal protest 
— keen in him, for he loved the human aspects of 
life — against the hardening changes of maturity. 

He went on savagely reflecting. He knew the in- 
transigence of youth, and the hardness of its gen- 
erosity. And besides she was a woman. There 
came into his mind a sally of an old humanist — La 
Bruyere — which he knew to be true to his own 
observation — that women cared nothing for the 
past. They did care nothing for it — nothing for 
the slow structure of accumulating wisdom built 
upon the experience of peoples and ages that were 
gone. There were almost no women historians, al- 



1 8 A Lover of the Chair 

most no women philosophers, almost no women hu- 
manists, though there were women poets and women 
novelists in profusion, and a growing body of women 
scientists, business women, and soon perhaps of 
politicians. Their concern was with the present and 
the immediate and the expedient. Their sensitive 
sympathies, touched quickly with the present reality, 
did much to mollify and humanize and warm a life 
left cold by the remoter rational dreams of men. 

He laughed aloud, mirthlessly, at the fine sweep 
of his generalization. But it seemed to him true, 
true in the large, though he saw in the situation 
about him that many men were throwing over their 
own for the feminine standard, were giving up their 
concern for the large vision of the past, and were 
substituting in human affairs the criterion of spon- 
taneous sympathy, for that of a wisdom broadly 
founded on the most significant of human experience. 

He rose and strode across the room. With the 
change of position there came into his mind the 
picture of the old man who had been hanging about 
the entry when he had come in. The pathos of 
that patient figure, and the recollection that he had 
passed him by without a word or a glance, smote 
him and brought moisture to his eyes. A sudden 
sympathy, such as he had never felt even when he 
had been most kind, suffused him, and snatching his 
hat and coat he went out to look for the old pen- 
sioner. The empty passage filled him with remorse, 
and sent him off to the poor rooms where the aged 
man lived. Clearly he was down with the malady. 

The relief of action gave a new turn to his inner 
conflict. In the days that followed, a surging hope 



A Lover of the Chair 19 

sang in his heart, and in leisure hours sent him wan- 
dering away from the populous streets to the bare 
wintry stretches of the park. Now for the first time 
in years he felt the thrill of kinship with the natural 
things that he had latterly shut himself away from. 
His eyes found a sudden pleasure in the intricate 
pattern of the twigs against the sky. The pale 
purity of the blue background caught a response in 
him that enriched the pleasure of his present per- 
ceptions with a resurgence of his childhood's love 
of color. He heard the thin minor pipe of a bird's 
winter song high up among the branches. Without 
his knowing why at first, nature was become thrill- 
ingly vital. Then he knew with a kind of shame 
that it was because of an absurd illusion. He seemed 
to be sharing his perceptions — hearing through 
other ears, seeing through other eyes, silently vol- 
uble the while to an invisible companion at his side 
in unutterable communion of the primal intuitions 
that lay at the bottom of his consciousness — colors, 
and sounds, and forms, and odors, the feel of the 
breeze on his cheek, of vigor in his blood, of ardor in 
his spirit, of beauty in external things, and of in- 
expressible emotions. 

It was the old and endeared story of his friend- 
ship, but with this difference — that it was no shar- 
ing of the conscious structure of the part of life 
builded together and lived in common, but the sud- 
den mystic hope, the semblance, the illusion, he 
could not have said, of sharing in that region from 
whose vague depths surged up the quickening in- 
tuitions that are the essence of life itself. His ele- 
mental perceptions brightened vividly, visibly, with 



20 A Lover of the Chair 

the sense of that response. He knew now in the 
aloof and ironic half of his consciousness the mean- 
ing of what the vulgar and the cultivated alike were 
reduced to calling love at first sight. There were 
moments when he felt ashamed, now that he was 
face to face with that part of his common humanity 
which he had so long suppressed. Yet there it was. 
And if it had come to him suddenly, lovers obviously 
needed no long experience in common; they had all 
the mystery of life in common. They might indeed 
add friendship when the fresh colors of the illusion 
had dulled, but in itself love was other than friend- 
ship. 

He knew now the meaning of the pregnant silence 
of lovers — the simple language of proximity — for 
the substance of their communion was beyond the 
reach of words. It was a commonplace to observe 
that men did not fall in love with cleverness, with 
virtue, with taste, with ability, with any of the cul- 
tivated qualities, though these might indeed comfort 
the conscience of the pure passion. It was the tem- 
perament, the barbaric and unsubdued nature, flam- 
ing beneath and through the character, that set the 
heart astir with thrilling illusions. Cleopatra, not 
Hypatia, had made the world's great love story. 

As he saw her again and again he was charmed 
with the accession of all the radiant, inexpressive 
qualities that he had created for her in his hours of 
dreaming. She was very young, scarcely twenty, 
but in trying to place her by recollecting his own 
state of mind at twenty he saw that he had no clue 
to her. She was older than he had been, and though 
she had less knowledge and less experience to build 



A Lover of the Chair 21 

upon, her simpHcity was thus the less far-reaching. 
It was piquant, and baffling, and competent. She 
took his presence with frank kindliness, talked with 
him without self-consciousness, and appealed from 
her ignorance to his knowledge with an open sin- 
cerity that smote him with the consciousness of his 
age. None the less it was captivating, not to his 
vanity, but to his love of the undisguised nature of 
her. She had what was rare in his experience of 
women — a way of saying yes and no firmly and 
quickly, with her mind on the subject, as though 
there were no impression to be made on the hearer, 
no personal matter lurking in the rear in danger of 
compromise. Her manner to him was open and 
ardent with her own vitality, but without a touch of 
the personal that he had come to think of as the dis- 
tinguishing feminine trait. 

She was, he came to believe, of the new order — 
firm of tread, of strong supple hands, and with a 
mind turned outward. She spoke recurrently, when 
they met again and again, of the problem that her 
awakening had put to her so poignantly. And in the 
vivid strength of his sympathetic appreciation of 
her, his heart failed him. He would have had her so 
little otherwise. Her youth, her ardor, her hot in- 
dignation, the generous reaction of her enlarging 
spirit in its first hard contact with an inveterate 
world, were too inherently right. Even from his own 
older point of view the alternative, embodied in the 
young women about them too absorbed in pleasure 
to have felt the pathos of life outside themselves, 
seemed to him shallow and ignoble. He had no wish 
to dull the fine keenness of her Utopian dreams with 



22 A Lover of the Chair 

his own sense of the hopelessness of her hope. If she 
should come some day to an understanding of his 
vision, it must be won by way of the path she had 
already started out upon ; and knowing the sanctions 
of the time, and remembering the slow struggle of 
his own solution, and realizing that she was a woman, 
he despaired again. His heart was still entangled 
with his brain. 

He spun for her, on the web of his imagination, 
a state of mind serenely impersonal, objective, and 
he dared not trespass upon it with his own more in- 
timate dream. With a humor that did little to soften 
the bitterness of his position he saw the touch of the 
ridiculous in his reversal of traditional relations — 
that it was he whose attitude was wholly personal 
and she who was aloof among larger concerns. It 
was no relief to realize that it was he who was ma- 
ture and she a girl hardly on the threshold of woman- 
hood. 

He held his peace, therefore, and lent himself to 
her service with an objective friendliness that he 
despaired of altering. He saw himself with a sar- 
donic smile, the aloof and ironic observer of men, 
dangling forlornly and helplessly after a girl, no dif- 
ferently from other poor mortals with no irony in 
their souls, and no philosophy in their outlook upon 
life. But the resolve to speak and put an end to 
his distraction, formed away from his sight of her, 
melted before the regard of her frank eyes when 
they met again. She was too young, and too simple, 
and too generous. He could not trouble with his 
passion the serenity of her maidenly spirit. 

With despairing clearness he saw that all the 



I 



A Lover of the Chair 23 

qualities on which he was wont to base his own self- 
regard — good sense, insight, understanding — 
added nothing to his intrinsic worthiness as a lover. 
In a sudden accession of humility he felt a kind of 
desecration in the thought that love should first 
breathe upon her unconscious youth from his own 
disillusioned lips. He could have chosen for her 
some radiant youth whose lineaments, he realized 
with a whimsical smile, were drawn from his own 
picture of herself. 

One day, when he found with forlorn amusement 
how thick the sheaf of verses had grown in which he 
had relieved the enforced silence of his feelings, he 
admitted the lover in himself to be typical, undis- 
guised, and to the top of the bent. But when he 
looked forward he saw no turning in the long lane 
ahead. He felt the bitter pain of his malady. In 
time it grew intolerable, and at last drove him to 
action. 

He inscribed in the fly-leaf of a book he had prom- 
ised her the fair copy of some verses he had writ- 
ten. They pleaded his cause from that fantastic 
elevation to which his over-sensitive interpretations 
had lifted it; and if after all they were prose, they 
had a touch of the dignity into which he had with- 
drawn to meet the blow which he knew must follow. 

Upon the top of this high wooded hill 
The temple we have builded stands serene, 
Stately and fair, with sunlit colonnades 
That open out for us on all the world. 

And you would linger, thus we differ so. 
Though friends no less, within the colonnades. 



24 A Lover of the Chair 

Where you and I, though we together walk 

Hand fast in hand and murmuring each to each, 

Must needs look outward; and the sunlit world, 

Lying before us, many-colored, fair. 

Or sometimes crying in its misery, 

Is with us in this temple we have wrought. 

Do you not see, dear, that we can not have 

Our temple, though we builded it ourselves, 

Without an inner portal which will lead — 

Ah, can it be you fear? — through twilit aisles 

To chapeled recesses, to mystic crypts, 

Down undreamed passages to tapered shrines — 

Perhaps with one shrine yet unguessed, whose god — 

Would it be only Friendship? Ah, who knows? 

He awaited with hot and cold blood the time 
when he should see her again, anticipating in her 
first glance the decision that he had precipitated. 
He looked at himself with baffled scorn. He had 
seen a good deal of the world, climbed its mountains, 
braved its seas, endured good fortune and bad, and 
had come back, to a life of seclusion indeed, but 
with toughened fibers and a mind above the foibles 
of ease-softened men, to sit aloof and understand 
that life that had proved so empty. And here was 
he, humbled to the common level, weaker than the 
lover of the ball room, trembling lest he fail to win 
a boon at the hands of a young girl, a personal boon 
— he who had thought to live above the petty and 
the personal — and a boon that would commit him 
to the petty and the personal for all his time to 
come. He scorned himself hotly — and he trembled 
for his fate. 



A Lover of the Chair 25 

When it came it came simply. Her steady eyes 
met his, fearlessly, tenderly. Without the ability to 
read there his sentence he saw swept away all the 
tangled cobwebs of his fantastic weaving. He had 
wrought masculinely, grotesquely; he had built in a 
realm of unreality. And now at once as they faced 
one another they were simply two — a man and a 
woman. In that timeless moment his love grew 
lucid and infinitely tender. He saw in her clear 
and calm eyes the pure and natural reality of their 
human relation, and her woman's competence to deal 
with her woman's crisis. The moment was simpler 
and more natural for her than for him. He felt 
very young in the presence of her immemorial wo- 
manhood. 

Then in the tremulous tension of her mouth, in 
her distressed brow, in the luminous promise of tears 
in her eyes, he read the simple sincerity of her un- 
derstanding and the pain of her denial. The bar- 
riers of opinion that had troubled him, the attitude 
to life, all the cultivated qualities of brain and 
heart were not of the situation. These were mat- 
ters of friendship, and she was still his friend. Her 
denial came from deeper sources. 

He had not known till then the intensity of his 
longing. The days and weeks of hot grief that fol- 
lowed were easier to bear than the later time of 
grey and empty indifference when life had faded and 
dulled, when he saw colors and lost their poignant 
appeal, when he heard melodies and cared nothing 
for their sweetness, and when old odors brought but 
the sense of waste in the tender memories that they 



26 A Lover of the Chair 

recalled. All the native intuitions and perceptions 
had gathered themselves for a supreme moment, and 
then, baffled and rejected, had sunk back withered 
and inert. 

When his interests began in time to revive he met 
them shamefacedly and fought them back. He clung 
desperately to his misery. Then one day he found 
himself smiling down at himself from his aloof con- 
ning tower. With that he knew that he was conva- 
lescent, and hungry again for life. 

He had no poignant regrets. Inevitably there 
were moments of loneliness, when his memory con- 
jured up old dreams. But he could smile at the 
idyllic inconsistency even of these dreams, knowing 
that only as dreams could they have left his life as 
happy as it was. For his present life suited the tem- 
per of his spirit. He rejoiced in its seclusion, in its 
leisure, in the dignity of a position that gave him 
entry to all sorts of men and excused him from the 
need to go among them. Echoes of reproach, espe- 
cially from feminine sources, that his way of life 
was wholly selfish, reached him from time to time, 
and amused him. At least he had done his best. The 
memory of old fears lest he miss some part of the 
typical life of men came back to him only to 
strengthen his philosophic acceptance of his own 
limitations. He saw these limitations now more 
clearly, and took himself as he was. Besides, he had 
had his romance. 

Looking backwards he reasoned that he had over- 
laid the spontaneous and natural elements of his 
temperament too deeply to strike, in some one else, 



A Lover of the Chair 27 

the answering spark of love. Love was a matter of 
temperament, of native, not acquired qualities. 

It was only later, when he fell again happily in 
love, that he ceased to generalize about the vagaries 
of this stirring and masterful passion. 



II 

CHAIR AND SADDLE 

IN the stretch that followed the rebellion of his 
early thirties he developed into a kind of ma- 
ture youthfulness that seemed, to his grim amuse- 
ment, to dodge awkwardly between the privileges 
of youth and the authority of age. His opinions 
were no longer smiled at tolerantly as the promising 
exuberance of young blood, nor listened to seriously 
as the accumulation of experience. 

Certain friends of his boyhood whom he saw now 
and again seemed to have done better. They gave 
him the impression of having definitely grown up. 
They were irritating in the effect they produced of 
terrible impressiveness, as though they had taken 
better advantage of their time and got on to a defi- 
nite maturity. They had set chins and firm mouths 
of the slightly hard American kind; they spoke in- 
cisively, without doubts and without shading; and 
they were listened to. For the most part they were 
in business, or in the professions that with us in 
America are the adjuncts of business. But occasion- 
ally some of them, or of their kind, had drifted into 
the more disinterested walks, and proved there to 
their own satisfaction and the general applause that 
wherever the red-blooded man got into the saddle 
the ambling nag underneath woke up and began a 
smart canter. 



Chair and Saddle 29 

He found his own nag, indeed, going at such a gait 
under him that he began to doubt whether he could 
keep his seat. And when he snatched fearful glances 
about him for a reasonably safe place to alight, he 
saw nothing but inhospitable doors closed to him. 
He perceived promptly enough that the difficulty 
lay in himself; his pace damned him. One door, 
however, he did try, without discarding his mount. 
It looked more inviting than any other he could see. 
But after a good deal of knocking he met with cour- 
teous refusals no less positive than those he had 
foreseen elsewhere. It was the door of the pub- 
lishers; he had begun to write. 

The stuff he wrote bore plainly the stamp of fu- 
tility; he dealt with what he was interested in and 
treated it from his own point of view. His interest 
was the eternal one, indeed, in human nature; but 
his point of view was the obsolete one that the 
French describe in the term moral — the disinter- 
ested play of the discursive reason in the field of 
life and letters. And he took it seriously. He had 
humor, it is true, but even his humor he took a 
little sadly, as befitted the human plight. It was 
with a wry smile, therefore, that he saw his efforts 
complained of as not sufficiently serious for publi- 
cation. 

His colleagues about him wrote and were pub- 
lished, but they wrote in a more current vein, senti- 
mentally, or scientifically, or in the interest of some 
propaganda or current enthusiasm. He took his 
grievance, however, without a sour face, and worked 
on undiscouraged, putting the substance of his ideas 
into brief essays condensed with the bitter pain of 



30 A Lover of the Chair 

concentration. There were passages that he be- 
lieved to have attained to some perfection of ex- 
pression. He could smile, indeed, at his own vanity, 
and not infrequently did, but it was disconcerting 
to have his labors smiled at by others. One frank 
editor spoke of them as the dilletante play of an 
otiose fancy. He cherished this comment grimly. 
It had been called forth by his animadversion that 
the significance of history lay in its interpretation. 
He collated this with the complaint of another edi- 
tor that he had used the reason where the reason 
had no place. His point on this occasion had been 
that the significance of poetry lay in the moving ex- 
pression of its idea. 

There was private amusement to be had out of 
all this, and in the serenity of his philosophic mo- 
ments he had the humor to suck enjoyment from it. 
But he was human enough in very virtue of the 
humane quality of his interests to long, at other and 
frequenter moments, for a little larger group to 
share his appreciation with, and take a little of the 
forlornness out of his fun. 

This forlornness became particularly acute one 
afternoon when he found himself forced to provide 
himself with new storage room for an intolerable 
heap of post-worn manuscripts that lay on his hands. 
In a collective survey he amused himself with the 
infinite variations of courtesy — ironic in the damn- 
ing fact of print — that were possible to notices of 
rejection. And on the heels of this, in a hurried 
half -hour's conversation, he was plunged into an- 
other variety of condemnation, and given to see with 
fine explicitness the ultimate reason for his obscurity. 



Chair and Saddle 31 

While he was dustily busy with this expanding 
heap of manuscripts, he was caught by one of his 
red-blooded colleagues, who had come in upon him 
on half -official matters. His visitor was one who had 
got on, one who sat the canter easily and touched 
it up with spur and crop. He rode well and erect 
and with a fine confidence; the glow of speed was in 
his eye. Certainly he was a more pleasing spectacle 
than the riders of the older school. 

He was a modern anti-intellectualist in his avowed 
philosophy and took his attitude quite seriously and 
not a little dogmatically — a reasoner of the type 
that so promptly accrued to M. Bergson's follow- 
ing. His discipleship was superficial, perhaps, but 
he had enough of that philosopher's convincing logic 
to disconcert those of his antagonists who stuck to 
a belief in the reason. 

From the aloof quiet of his library, where our 
friend spent enough of his days to keep his judg- 
ments unroiled, this personage had seemed to him 
eminently unimportant. But there was a sense con- 
nected with some of his current reflections in which 
unimportant was a very hard word to pronounce. 
For the man was of the kind that inevitably won 
suffrage and built upon suffrage. And his particu- 
lar combination of politics and anti-intellectualism 
was growing common and desperately effective. 

These reflections were sufficiently irrelevant at the 
moment, and only won pertinence by the accident of 
a discussion that the two men, so polar in their 
inner opposition, fell into on another topic. The 
pile of rejected manuscripts was lying openly con- 
fessional on the table before them, and shrank a bit, 



32 A Lover of the Chair 

in the sensitive person of their author, before the 
successful presence that now confronted it. For 
this red-blooded modern was the author of three 
widely read books, and had become what in the 
current tongue is called an "authority" on social 
questions. 

Our friend himself was not unfound on that score, 
and had indeed been reading the rejection of an 
article mildly social when the other entered. It had 
been so unusual in its terms, this rejection, and so 
caustic in its revelation of the editor's bitter soul, 
that he took now a kind of ironic joy in handing it 
over to his visitor with a wave of his hand toward 
the rejected remains on the table. 

The moment he withdrew his fingers he repented. 
For the other, though he had wit enough, had little 
of that self-directed humor that is the mother of 
urbanity among equals. His dogmatic and un- 
doubting temper served him well among those who 
discover seriousness only in solemnity — college 
officials, the world of women's clubs, and the more 
intelligent philistines — and it was among them that 
he had won his place as a man of ideas. But for 
friendly talk upon serious subjects he had none of 
the penetrating frankness, the experimental courage, 
the amused self-doubt, that make an adventure of 
conversation. Our friend, therefore, watched the 
perusal with a touch of compunction. He was un- 
certain how it would be taken. 

'We publish what will go," the editor had said, 
"and your stuff won't go. It is detached, disinter- 
ested. You lack what is known as 'life'. You don't 
content yourself with the immediate play of appear- 



Chair and Saddle 33 

ances — of things. Your ideas are general; they are 
ideas; you say what is true of a number of cases 
instead of what is true of a single case — of what is 
unique. You lack edge. You ought to catch the 
vivid drift of a lock of hair across a fair brow; and 
what you do is to catch the invisible turn of mind 
of a whole section of mankind. You try to write for 
people who are educated, people who think alike 
even when they disagree, who know an idea when 
they see one, and aren't pared down to the senses 
God gave them to go to the movies with. And such 
people no longer exist. 

"You see evils, and you blame the readers for 
them; what we want is to blame someone else. You 
have an idea that the people in their normal char- 
acter — temper, intelligence, and morals — deter- 
mine the quality of their own social conditions, and 
that whatever revolution may come they drift back, 
after it, to the old level, through the push of those 
same normal forces. We want to spread the idea 
that by a burst of energy a device can be got into 
operation that will take the place of personal virtue 
and intelligence. You want to make people mistrust 
their normal selves; we want to make them trust 
their normal selves. ..." 

When his visitor looked up our friend was winc- 
ing under the recollection of raw and flattering ex- 
aggerations in certain phrases of the letter. He need 
not. The face that looked at him was full of com- 
placent sympathy. 

"He is pretty hard on you." 
"Bitterly," our friend returned. 
"You are a conservative, I take it." 



34 A Lover of the Chair 

"No, a radical." 

"But these things he says ..." 

"My radicalism is what he objects to." 

"I'm afraid I don't understand." There was a 
touch of asperity in the voice now. 

"You are right and I am wrong," his host re- 
turned. "I was playing with the idea. My point was 
simply that ideas lie at the root of all our voluntary 
changes, and as I was in search of ideas I called 
myself a radical — ideas, of course, in the sense of 
those guiding principles and opinions that determine 
actions." 

His visitor pondered for a moment, the impa- 
tience not quite gone from the finger tips that tapped 
the arm of his chair. He was a Liberal of the cur- 
rent school, and our friend found, in the none too 
urbane discussion which followed, something of the 
serious amusement with which he normally looked 
upon certain of the Liberal paradoxes. 

"Conservative, though, in the ordinary sense?" 
his guest asked at last. 

"I imagine; though sometimes when I look around 
I wonder what I want to conserve." 

"The authority of the few, I judge." 

"If I could select my few," our friend smiled. 
"But yes, that in principle. 

"You hold against the majority opinion." 

"As such, yes. The point is, of course, the very 
old commonplace that the idea ought to be judged 
on its own." 

The subject was broached, and our friend drew 
himself together in response to an indefinable loin- 
girding on the part of his guest. 



Chair and Saddle 35 

"Aren't you describing," the latter began — 
"aren't you describing the conditions that made for 
this?" And his hand rested on the pile of rejected 
manuscripts. 

"Ah, there they are," our friend smiled wryly. 

"I don't so much mean," hastened his interlocu- 
tor, "that you should write what the people want — 
that you should be a trimmer'. What I mean is that 
a philosopher of the few can expect to find his 
readers limited." 

"I wish I could make them more," his host re- 
turned heartily. "You have managed it. I won't 
ask for advice, for I suppose I am like others and 
would go on in my old way in spite of it. But the 
idea would be — ?" 

"To have another philosophy." 

"Of the many?" 

"Yes." 

The distinction between that and trimming was at 
first obscure, and indeed it left the Liberal a little 
uncomfortable. 

"You must have the philosophy, of course," he 
went on. "There is the difference. For my own 
part I think that the time has past when the finest 
minds aim at distinction. Rather they prize what 
is common to all humanity, and prefer to merge 
their own with the universal mind and will of the 
race." 

Our friend made no answer. His thoughts went 
for a moment to the obscurity of those few at whom 
the remark seemed to be aimed, and at the eminence 
of those who caught the general ear. He wondered 
whether, for these latter, independent thinking did 



36 A Lover of the Chair 

appear to be only a bid for distinction — whether 
perhaps, in the habit of building upon suffrage, they 
had not lost the drive and compulsion of an indi- 
vidual opinion. 

"My trouble is,'' he resumed at last, "that I find 
it hard to know what you mean. I don't know how 
to think except with my own mind. And when I 
find that differing from the popular one — why, I 
side with myself. It's an old-fashioned egotism, 
but I don't see how I can do anything else." 

"You are an intellectual," the other returned, 
" — you don't mind my saying it? — and I imagine 
that the day of the intellectuals has passed. I find 
myself a little abrupt, but we started by explaining 
that heap of manuscripts. You say that they don't 
go. And I should say that perhaps the reason is 
that, so to speak, the bottom has fallen out of intel- 
lectualism. You trust to your reason, you intellec- 
tuals, and yet — Shall we go into this?" 

j^By all means." 

'"Well, then, at the bottom is the fact that the 
reason has no solid criteria, nothing stable to build 
upon, nothing indisputable except — I speak imper- 
sonally — the self-complacency of an elect that 
have been self -elected. And now that our modern 
philosophy has shown how fluid and misty and wil- 
ful the premises of your reason are, there is a kind 
of sense abroad that the intellectuals have rather 
imposed on humanity in the past. The movement 
of Liberalism has been a steady revolt against self- 
constituted authority — priest, autocrat, tyrant, and 
now the intellectuals — arbiters of all kinds who set 
themselves up as umpires of actions or ideas or 
tastes.^' 



Chair and Saddle 37 

An ironic retort clamored for release. Our friend 
compromised. 

''My own difficulty," he said, ''when I get to that 
stage of skepticism, is that there seems to be no 
warrant for any ideas at all." 

"That is it," the other assented. 

"But you Liberals — just now you seem to be full 
of ideas. You quite go in for regulation, restriction, 
and the control of the individual." 

"It is true, of course," the other returned, "but if 
there is no warrant for ideas as such, it is our belief 
that the ideas that go ought to be selected by those 
who are going to be affected by them." 

"Everyone for himself?" 

"That would be anarchy. No — on the whole and 
in the large." 

"By majority vote, then." 

"Yes. On the belief that the majority opinion 
is the wisest and justest obtainable." 

Our troubled friend pondered for a moment over 
his guest's thus begging the question. To postulate 
the majority opinion should have been the last word; 
to bring in "justice" and "wisdom" was to bring in 
ideas. But he gave over the point as too subtle for 
their present driving manner. He went on to another 
point that troubled him. 

"Majority opinion — you use the phrase. But 
for my own part, when I try to follow that concep- 
tion down to the roots, and get rid, as you have done 
just now, of all individual opinion and all new ideas 
that crop up in individual minds, all that I find is 
just what is — what is. What is, at any moment, 
is the expression of the aggregate opinion, the bal- 



SS A Lover of the Chair 

ance of all the extant motives. For anyone to try 
to change the situation would be to try to inject an 
idea into the balance — and that is against the 
theory. The only thing to do would be to let things 
drift." 

'^Opinions, of course, have to begin somewhere," 
the other answered. "The Liberal point is, nat- 
urally, that they should be made over into majority 
opinion by general explanation and persuasion. 
Aren't you a little over-subtle?" 

Our friend smiled. It was subtlety or nothing. 
With a sigh he saw fate descending upon him. The 
other, with his fine flow, and the touch of tolerance 
which his red blood gave him the lordly right to, 
would in a moment ride off in triumph. Nothing 
could better the fine manner, but it refined even 
upon itself with the open generosity with which it 
smiled and mollified its rebuke. What wonder its 
owner won suffrage! Our friend squirmed with the 
sense of his own insignificance. 

''My point," he went on, none the less, with a 
desperate pride, ''is that for the moment we are 
both of us getting at the bottom, and the bottom is 
always a little elusive. For my part I wanted to get 
at two things. And now you must smile, or what I 
say will be intolerable. These manuscripts of mine 
— to tell the truth I should like to see my ideas 
taken up and become majority opinion. I have my 
vanity, you see. That puts them, philosophically, on 
all fours with a Liberal opinion, doesn't it, before the 
Liberal opinion gets majority support?" 

The other waited with a kindly smile. 

"We are all, I imagine," our friend went on, 



Chair and Saddle 39 

"tarred with the same stick — tainted with intellec- 
tualism. Even you use your reason to persuade us 
that reason is fustian; and but a moment since you 
spoke of making over individual opinion into ma- 
jority opinion by general explanation and persua- 
sion. And in your politics you propound theories of 
wisdom and justice in majorities that seem to some 
of us the most airy and brain-spun of pure ideas. 
We are all of us condemned to intellectualism so 
long as we talk, and plan, and keep a pride in our 
human capacity to affect our own fate. And it is 
you Liberals who have the greatest faith in that 
capacity. 

"Those are some of the reasons why some of us 
hold back from what in many ways can't help having 
a strong appeal to us. For my own part I like your 
Liberal hopes even when I can't hope with you. But 
your theories often, as in this case, go too much 
against even your inner beliefs and outer practices to 
win our sympathy. Like you we must go on saying 
what we think. I am afraid that my heap of stuff 
must go on piling up. And really what else is there 
for it?" 

The other sat for a moment, pondering the little 
problem that so troubled his host. 

"The trouble lies in your ideas," he said at last. 
"As your harsh editor writes, they won't do. You 
are conservative; and the day of conservatism is 
past. As for us, we have faced about. We are look- 
ing at the future. And then, too, it is your attitude. 
Where you differ from the Liberals is in this — that 
you care more for your ideas than you do for hu- 
manity." 



40 A Lover of the Chair 

"And yet," our friend mused, '4t is you who wish 
to change humanity according to your ideas, and we 
who wish to preserve what humanity has estab- 
lished." 

They hung upon that for a moment. There was a 
disconcerting point to it. 

"It it a matter of sympathy — sympathy for 
the human thing," his visitor concluded, ignoring 
the pause. "The whole Liberal effort, often bungling 
I dare say, is aimed at the opening up of more and 
more of the vital sources of this humanity. Look at 
it now, nine tenths of it suppressed, mute, going to 
waste, humanly speaking, like immemorial ants. I 
have turned over a stone on a lonely mountain peak 
in the Rockies, and watched the endless conserva- 
tism of a life there that has not changed from the 
beginning, and will not change, slaves and rulers 
alike, to a disheartening eternity. And when I have 
looked back at humanity again, and seen so much of 
the dull repetition of that endless spectacle under 
the stone, I have seen too that the human thing is to 
get away from that — to change, to progress, and 
to give the least of them some share in the forces of 
change. That is what I mean by democracy. If you 
are not in sympathy with that movement — "he 
smiled kindly and waved his hand toward the heap 
on the table — "I'm afraid you will go on building 
your sad monument here. For we are likely to be 
permanent; in a democracy might and authority are 
on the same side." 

He left, and left our friend in the itching discom- 
fort of unvented opinion. "To give to the least of 
them some share in the forces of change!" Change 



Chair and Saddle 41 

in what direction, and with what aim? And in that 
question was involved the problem that this modern 
was so scornful about through his philosophical vent. 
Clearly the terrible thing about him and his Liberal 
partisans was their extreme intellectualism through 
their political vent. They would mold life over, at 
once, and with a stroke of the pen. 

Still he knew that there was a case for these men 
of action — a case as good as his own. He had the 
ambiguous blessing of imagination and could see 
himself, in the interims of his militant moods, from 
their point of view. They were the masters of the 
world, and if they had the strut and swagger of con- 
querors, who could blame them, or blame them the 
touch of contempt, kindly or tolerant, but still con- 
tempt, with which they must look down on the 
aenemic scholar bending over his midnight treatise, 
feet cold and head hot, wrestling with subtle brain- 
spun distinctions twixt tweedledum and tweedledee 
that the gross world could never see, or seeing could 
never have the patience or the care to act upon? 

He had no contempt of his own, however, for his 
own kind. Rather he knew that each was necessary, 
each complementing the other. It was a game, one 
of the eternal conflicts, and he took it so, not flip- 
pantly, but with the decent good humor that should 
keep bitterness out of the calculation. He saw, too, 
that if the men of action so often had the better of it 
in the way of action, the others as often had the bet- 
ter of it in the way of ideas; and having chosen his 
side he could have nothing to complain of. He 
played the game hard, therefore, no doubt often 
puffing and blowing in the heat of hard-fought points, 



42 A Lover of the Chair 

but willing in the end to acknowledge the fight worth 
while and his opponent the thing that made it so. 

He sat musing after his guest's departure, stirred 
to his reflections by the sense that it was such irri- 
tations as he had just been chafing under that roused 
him to react. For he was tingling pleasantly with 
the consciousness that there was still something 
more to be said about ideas and Liberalism. 



I 



Ill 

A LIBERAL EXPERIENCE 

THE point of this adventure was in the pecu- 
liarly tentative turn of it. The adventurer 
himself, in the midst of American life where so many 
masculine things have gone overboard, had main- 
tained toward practical affairs a very masculine habit 
of disinterested observation and reflection. He 
paid a high price for the indulgence. He forfeited 
the approval of the feminine part of the local world 
he lived in, and with us that comes to a very swinge- 
ing majority. The older-fashioned among them felt 
the ancient, subtle resentment at his aloofness, qua 
aloofness, and the newer-fashioned resented his 
thoughtfulness for not being immediate, and ardent, 
and propagandist. 

The end of it was that he came back after his 
adventure to a very lively and very much heated 
public opinion. The adventure itself was over and 
done before the war began in 19 14, and the local 
flare would probably have gone out as rapidly as 
such flares do if the war itself had not intervened 
to give a peculiar edge to his speculations. By a 
slender tenure he held a post that was half public in 
its nature, and this public exposure laid him open 
to what followed. What did follow was a good deal 
of newspaper publicity, and a delegation. 



44 A Lover of the Chair 

He dealt with the delegation patiently, a little 
amusedly. It was in the nature of his temper that 
he could not answer questions in monosyllables, and 
the delegation wanted monosyllabic answers. They 
wanted to know specifically whether he believed in 
democracy. His reply was not evasive, but it was 
laborious and complex, and probably seemed eva- 
sive to their impatience. 

What he tried to make them see, and what seemed 
so hard for them to see, was that since we were al- 
ready a democracy the great thing was to maintain 
a constant and goading criticism of it. To them 
criticism meant simple hostility. They did not quite 
grasp his interest in the idea, or fathom his sense 
that to question the idea at every point was the only 
mode of keeping it vital. His answer that it was 
not the critical but the uncritical who were the 
threat to democracy, left them a little hostile. In 
the end their blunt question whether if he could he 
would overthrow democracy tomorrow brought out 
his surprised and evidently sincere, ^^No." They 
left him then. They were puzzled, a little angry. 
They seemed to have been robbed of the ground they 
were standing on. 

The adventure itself took place not in America at 
all. A half-pay sabbatical had offered him a long- 
hoped-for year of leisure, and he had elected to 
spend it abroad. He wanted certain things that 
he could get nowhere else — contact again with 
old and vivid associations, and access to Paris, to 
the Alps, and to Italy. Above all he wanted the 
perspective of America that nothing but detachment 



A Liberal Experience 45 

could give. Not inauspiciously he settled upon 
London. 

Before he had left a conscientious acquaintance 
had intimated to him with tact that his going was a 
piece of self-indulgence not so altruistic as the world 
was latterly demanding of its best spirits — that the 
old ideal of self-improvement was giving way before 
the newer one of service. 

The good will, the large, vague, myopic aspiration 
that peered out of the earnest, solemn face before 
him made it impossible to smile. Our friend kept 
silence, waiting for other bolts from that quiver. 
They came, one after another, with the persuasive 
sincerity that made it hard to treat them humanly as 
they deserved. If these men could only laugh ! But 
they had no laughter in them. Clearly they had 
taken too seriously the substitution of service for 
self-improvement. 

He knew that the best Liberals had no belief in 
such clap-trap, however sincerely it came from the 
mouths of the feeble; but he found himself in this 
quandary as to Liberalism even at its best — that 
whatever the beauty of Liberal ideals they were 
calculated to put increasing power into the hands of 
people like the little man before him, and of people 
who found such logic plausible. 

It was this latter perception, flashed on him on 
the eve of his going away, that gave a bent to his 
observations and reflections abroad — the percep- 
tion that Liberalism had no adequate criticism in 
America. There was plenty of opposition, it was 
true, but he knew that for the most part it was 
merely illiberal opposition — the opposition of the 



46 A Lover of the Chair 

dog with a bone to the dog with none. That antago- 
nism threw his sympathies so far to the side of 
Mother Hubbard's poor beast, that if he could have 
seen no third way out he would have gone over 
heart and soul to the Liberals themselves. He 
thought that he did see a third way out, however, 
though to get to it now would be too blind a leap in 
the dark. So he set himself, once off the ground of 
his responsibilities, to groping toward it. 

He settled in London in the pleasant way they 
have there that goes by the name of ''lodgings." It 
took, indeed, some courage for our friend to brave 
it alone, for the peculiar delight of lodgings begins 
when good comrades go it together, and increases 
with the number of available acquaintances to be 
invited in at will. But he began it, and for a time 
the revival of old impressions kept him company 
enough. 

"London!" he wrote back at the end of his first week. 
"The thing is that you feel at home here. You've been 
taking it in from the time you first wept over Oliver 
Twist and Little Nell. How universal and maudlin and 
sincere those insincerities of Dickens were; they caught 
us all where we lived. 

"Nothing amazes you. That is the great impression 
that London revisited makes. You expect everything, 
and everything turns out as you expected — the soften- 
ing grime of the London air, the lumbering busses, St. 
Paul's and the river, the faces that Phiz stamped on 
your brain years ago and you called impossible, shabby- 
genteel ghosts out of Thackeray, intricate streets, and 
names that are names of romance clinging here to dingy 
reality. . . , " 



A Liberal Experience 47 

After the pleasant restlessness of his first few 
weeks had given way to an heroic treatment of in- 
dulgence, and he had settled into a quieter content 
with afternoon divings into the maelstrom, his re- 
flections and his readings began to draw in upon the 
special object he had set himself in pursuit of. There 
were moments in these devious excursions into the 
darker corners of the town when he was tempted in 
rebellion to throw over the curious scrutiny of po- 
litical ideas and to rest passionately on any party 
that would undertake, with pity and courage, to 
strike a blow for the relief of the misery of the poor. 
So much was he touched by two or three instances 
of degradation in poverty that came home to his 
definite knowledge, and by at least one moving 
case where a timely rescue had justified the hopes 
that had prompted it, that he felt again the ardor 
of his old-time dreams. He saw again from the 
point of view of those who looked with intolerant 
impatience upon those who sat aloof and spun 
theories. His own years of secluded and snug re- 
flection smote him. All this reversion was tentative, 
appreciative, rather than active. He realized again 
how men might abandon themselves to those fer- 
vors, though he was, no doubt, far from such aban- 
donment himself. 

It was in a mood of this kind that he went one 
day to hear a Liberal speaker who promised to deal 
frankly with the problem. The plea was half given 
over to touching pictures* of wretchedness. If the 
speaker had stopped at that he would have done 
well. The difficulty was that he could not stop at that. 
To stop at that was to stop at the present, to rouse 



48 A Lover of the Chair 

the sympathies of the men and women in front of 
him, and send them at most on separate errands of 
kindness to the unfortunates whose sufferings they 
could reach. But the speaker was not looking to 
immediate acts of charity and kindness. He was 
looking into the future. He was looking to such a 
control of affairs as would prevent forever the con- 
ditions he found so intolerable. He wanted those 
men and women whose sympathies he had stirred to 
co-operate with him in a scheme of control. It was 
nobly and generously done. But it cured our friend 
of his moment of weakness. It was patent at once 
that the only grasp the speaker could have on 
the future was the despised one of the aloof theorists 
themselves. He had nothing to offer but an idea. 
One of his auditors went away knowing, as he had 
never quite ceased to know, that aside from the duty 
of personal kindliness, the problem was to lay hands 
on the right idea and make it prevail. 

He saw, indeed, how it was possible to be too 
aloof and to sit and spin ideas in cold words out of 
a cold heart. But ideas quite clearly there must be. 
And now, though he listened to one Liberal after 
another, and found in them no suspicion of spinning 
cold words out of a cold heart, there began to take 
vague shape in his mind the audacious conception 
that the trouble with Liberalism — whatever the vir- 
tues of individual Liberals — was, surprisingly, just 
that it had no idea. That the conception was quite 
vague, quite shadowy, he saw with a smile at his 
own expense. He was even a little shocked at it. 
But it would not be dissipated by scrutiny. When 
he found it thus standing its ground, refusing to 



A Liberal Experience 49 

vanish at cock crow, he sat down to question it by 
light of day. 

It remained for the time, however, dim and un- 
pleasantly ghostly. But it attained thus much of 
definition as he examined it — that whatever the 
idea that the Liberals should put up as the funda- 
mental determinant of their political belief, that idea 
might be overthrown by something still more funda- 
mental in that belief — by the majority. 

His own notion of a political principle or idea was 
that it should itself be fundamental and constant — 
as human affairs go — and should, so to speak, gov- 
ern instead of being governed. The very point of 
an idea was that it stood over against letting things 
go as they would; and the final dependence upon 
majority opinion seemed very much like letting 
things go as they would. 

He jotted these animadversions down in letters 
home, and went on observing and reflecting. Later, 
when he had got better settled, and the terrace 
where he had his lodgings had begun to separate 
itself into its particulars, acquaintance took up its 
task of softening judgments with sympathies. His 
perceptions began to have more color, and the re- 
flections that had commenced misty took on faint 
lines of definition. With the ounce of compunction 
that was his usual tribute to the red face of the pil- 
lar box after his fingers had released a letter, he 
had already seen that in denying an idea to the Lib- 
erals he had overlooked one possibility; — that the 
belief in the majority might of itself be an idea of 
the kind he was asking for, a steadying and guiding 
principle. 



50 A Lover of the Chair 

As a matter of bare logic he knew that there was 
no necessary relationship between a majority and 
either wisdom or justice. But he caught himself up 
at that, remembering that bare logic was far from 
being all that there was to be said about human 
affairs. And now as he looked about at the men 
and women around him, with the curious eyes of a 
stranger to whom nothing is staled by custom and 
nothing is taken for granted, and with the growing 
sympathies of a more inclusive acquaintance than 
he had ever formed before, he began to perceive 
that the majority was not a mere mathematical 
count, but rather was very human, made up of men 
and women who, within the range of possibility, 
might themselves be both wise and just. The ques- 
tion after all and at bottom was a question of fact. 
Establish the fact and the rest could be reasoned. 
He began to look curiously into the fact. 

He was in one of those streets off Bayswater Road 
— stuccoed ghosts of Georgian fashion — that 
gather an odd mixture of people but still maintain a 
kind of identity of their own. It was not an identity 
of wealth; it was distinctly lodgings. There were 
rarely occasional villas inside their own grounds, and 
some of the denizens were idlers; but the general 
tone of the street was made by "activity" of some 
kind, and had an intellectual flavor. The denizens 
were neither economic sufferers nor economic op- 
pressors, but belonged to the fluider parts of the 
middling class, and were free enough both from 
poverty and wealth to do with themselves after their 
own human leanings. 

As for our friend, his lingering glance and the 



A Liberal Experience 51 

lucid humanity in it broke through the reserve of a 
good many of his neighbors. Among themselves 
there was little enough intercourse; the hard con- 
sciousness of a settled society held them apart. But 
the American was outside of it. He had nothing 
about him but his common humanity; he had no 
ramifications; he did not signify beyond the signifi- 
cance of his presence. And because he was outside 
of it he was, humanly speaking, let more into it than 
they themselves. 

The secret of his glance was, perhaps, that it re- 
vealed interest without impertinence, and personal 
distinction without the consciousness of class. It 
dealt out none of the chagrins that make social com- 
parisons so much harder to bear than personal. At 
home the irony of his tongue had countered the 
sympathy and simplicity of his eye, but at home, 
for him too, the eternal responsibility for the quality 
of life had edged and roughened many of his gentler 
qualities. Here, however, he was detached, and 
life was a spectacle, and he could fall into the very 
simple bent of his very human nature. There was 
a sense of relief in this irresponsibility — so pleasant 
a relief that at times he plunged back into his old 
militant scorns with a vigour that came from a 
conscience alarmed at its own relaxation. 

A sympathetic serenity, however, was his normal 
mood; his mind was fallow. He read, sometimes in 
his own room and sometimes under the dome of the 
Museum, walked interminably in the streets, sat in 
the crescent that stretched before the Terrace, and 
passively cultivated the seeds of acquaintance that 
blew into his garden. 



52 A Lover of the Chair 

And slowly, as summer passed and autumn came 
in, two impressions gathered weight and momentum 
in his mind. Sometimes as he left the Museum at 
the approach of dusk and turned eastward toward 
the City he gave a loose to his legs, and with a mind 
full of the echoes of ten centuries of life that had 
resounded on that spot, let them thread the intricate 
pattern, so planless and so human — street and lane, 
flagged passage, hole in the wall — which men had 
drawn there so impersonally under the drive of mo- 
mentary needs that the triter phrase time seemed 
to be truer than men to name the workman and point 
the moral of the tale. 

In a little passage off Cheapside there was a leg- 
less beggar whom he found altogether loquacious and 
delightful, and whom he came to like so well for the 
shrewd humour with which he confronted good for- 
tune and bad, that one day, in a mood that he after- 
ward knew to be born of his own simplicity, he 
gathered together an elaborate stock of the strings 
and pencils that the cripple used, to keep himself 
inside the law, and sent them secretly by messenger 
to the accustomed corner. He never saw them 
again. But when next he stood against the wall of 
the passage watching the crowd and talking at odd 
moments down into the cocked ears below him, he 
heard in terms of gay and sophisticated irony the 
tale of his own naivete. 

"A good 'earted fool 'e was, sir, whoever 'e was, 
but a fool just the same. 'Arf a day more and crool 
ruin 'd a 'ad me. 'E don't know 'is economics, 'e 
don't." 

Bagdad or London, age of romance or dismal sci- 



A Liberal Experience 53 

ence — what matter was it? Human nature re- 
mained unchanged. 

To stand there at that thronged corner of a bye 
street, and to watch faces; to catch fragments of 
talk, of despairs, of passions, of ribaldry and hope; 
to see beneath the negligible cut of altered styles 
the immemorial t3q3es — fishwife, porter, coster, pub- 
lican, lean sharper of the law, saintly-eyed priests, 
cripples from the wars, pale dapper clerks, robber 
barons of the Castle or the Street, painted women; 
or to sit in dingy taverns and hear the wranglings of 
immemorial prejudice, obstinate and passionate over 
immemorial beer ; or in urbaner ordinaries and catch 
the ancient parochial platitudes of life and death, of 
egotism, of caste, of the neglect of merit — to ob- 
serve all this with sympathy and detachment was 
to lose track of the century and feel the slow inertia 
of the bulk of human life. 

At such moments the recollection of his readings, 
through years in his library at home, and more re- 
cently under the dome of the Museum, took on a 
peculiar light. It was a light that was starry in its 
lucid and utter detachment. Plato, Jesus, Anto- 
ninus, Dante, St. Francis, Pascal, Carlyle — the list 
indeed was long, but they stood out sharply against 
the great immensity of the night. In them, and in 
the stream of their tradition, was matter to make 
over a world that had been more rational and more 
kind. What more, or better, was to be said to the 
reasoning mind or the pitying heart? And how little 
they had prevailed with the great turgid stream of 
life! 

In his earlier and lonelier days in London such 



54 A Lover of the Chair 

visions were frequent enough to have become im- 
pressive. He owned grudgingly their truth, and saw 
in them the sad bidding to infinite and pitying pa- 
tience. But though he longed to drag his Liberal 
friends to that beggar's corner and bring home to 
them the unchanging spectacle and humble their 
confident eagerness, he caught also for his own 
warning the odor of poppies that clung about such 
broodings. 

It was with some violence to his mood, therefore, 
that he took himself humorously in hand. The sense 
of the inveterate inertia of the mass of life still went 
with him, ground note of a complex harmony; but 
he turned himself back to his terrace with the recol- 
lection of his own fugitive littleness, and reminders 
that he was of his own time, and that the problem 
of his own time was the fusing of those two streams, 
dark and light. That, at least, was the proposal of 
the Liberals ; and it was with them that he was just 
now concerned. 

He began now to see more sharply the terms of 
his problem. If the Liberals held out hopes that in 
the fusion it should be the light that had the better 
of it and not the dark, he had, here on the Terrace, 
something significant to watch — something of the 
bare terms of the actual process. For in the course 
of his first months there he had caught the quality 
of his neighbourhood. It was intelligent; it was 
Liberal, it was in an especial degree what the Lib- 
erals wanted to make of the whole mass — it was 
economically free. He had but a little while before 
been inclined to complain that Liberalism had 
nothing else at the bottom of its bag. But now he 



A Liberal Experience 55 

was not so confident of his old assurances; at all 
events he was more tolerant of the Liberal faith that 
given economic freedom the rest would follow. And 
so he set about to observe what, stripped of the 
adventitious and the eccentric, typically did follow 
with these men and women whom Liberalism had 
finished with. He wanted, above everything, to be 
actual. If the case of the majority was to be 
grounded on the fact, the fact was the thing to be 
looked at. And here was a significant sample of the 
fact. 

There was enough humour in him, of a self- 
directed and ironic kind, to keep his thinking sane, 
and the inevitable pride of perception never quite 
deceived him into a belief that his score of motley 
neighbours were an ultimate picture of the Liberal 
accomplishment. But his humour could work both 
ways, and if he demanded that the counters of his 
own ideas should be fleshly and real, he demanded no 
less of the Liberals themselves. And it seemed to 
him, then and afterwards, that though the Liberals 
showed a throbbing sense of reality in conceiving 
their sympathies, and winning the sympathies of 
others, there was something a little detached and 
abstract about their thinking in the large. Some of 
their phrases — the average, the will of the people, 
majority opinion — seemed to him to have got their 
warmth rather from the emotions that made the 
Liberal motives than from a warm reality in the con- 
ceptions themselves. Their moral substance dis- 
solved under concrete inspection. Their cold statis- 
tical values seemed far enough removed from the 
personal immediacy of the very human problem that 
politics at its best set out to solve. 



56 A Lover of the Chair 

What he saw there on the Terrace was that he had, 
if not an equivalence of the Liberal goal, at least a 
spectacle that could keep warmth and reality in his 
phrases. If they were, these neighbors of his, quite 
startlingly individual, and concretely set up on their 
own legs, and set going by their own spontaneities, 
he detected the last touch of their very human 
reality in their proneness to fall into human ten- 
dencies. For one thing they were all Liberals. That 
was, indeed, almost the only thing that they had in 
common, but they did separately manage to fall into 
many of the grooves and ruts of the time. If they 
did not violate reality by being generic abstractions, 
neither did they violate it by being unique. They 
were knowably human, and quite humanly sociable, 
and lonely, and anxious to accrue somewhere, to 
belong to something bigger than themselves, to give 
some significance to the grievous isolation of indi- 
viduality. 

How far they blew with the winds of opinion in 
England he could hardly venture to say. Aristo- 
cratic tradition there still had vitality. But he knew 
his own country, and as he looked about him at that 
London terrace, he seemed to see, beneath the sur- 
face, something of the array of moral and intellectual 
diversity that touched to the life his picture of Lib- 
eral America. 

A September fog — his first fog in London — was 
enriched in its associations, if not made more en- 
durable, by what at home would have been a painful 
but unromantic twinge of rheumatism. Here, how- 
ever, he felt entitled to the honors of gout, and bore 
himself between twinges with a humorous sense of 



A Liberal Experience 57 

this visitation as a thing of quite literary quality. 
There was a more substantial reward in it, however, 
in the fact that it brought the beginning of a new and 
more intimate stage in his acquaintance with the 
curious medley in the Terrace. The garrulous S3nii- 
pathy of his landlady, no doubt, spread the rumor 
that the poor American gentleman was laid by with 
the more euphemistic malady. He became promptly 
the object of much good feeling and not a few acts 
of kindness. They came to him, these kindly neigh- 
bors, with the warrant of previous conversations 
in the lounge, and with the tradition of his Ameri- 
canism to excuse their unreserve. They came singly, 
for they held aloof from each other, and came again, 
finding in him a disinterested attentiveness that was 
soothing to their egotisms. They talked about 
themselves, as interesting men do, and as uninterest- 
ing men do, and they were often intimate in the im- 
personal manner of people who are immersed in 
special ways of judging the world. 

In the semi-detachment that comes with chronic 
and not too acute pain in a remote member, he 
watched the little drama of conflicting ideas that 
the house was staging around him, the rasping an- 
tagonisms implied and expressed in their allusions to 
each other, their mutual avoidances and constraints. 
So that his days of confinement, when he came to 
look back on them, took on the colors of quick and 
significant action. His memory of it all was no 
doubt highly selective, but the stuff that he found 
in it was clearly enough present in the reality. 

The first one to knock timidly at his door was a 
woman. She lived in a little back room on his own 



58 A Lover of the Chair 

floor, overlooking an area and a whitewashed wall. 
Twenty years before, when she was twenty, she had 
written a novel. Hearts Aflame; a copy of it lay 
now, its lavender boards soiled and broken, on the 
parlour table below. She had never got another 
published. Soon the world had begun to frighten 
her, and she had taken to ''metaphysics." Her face 
was thin and the veins showed on the meager cheeks, 
but there were delicate lips and dark eyes that still 
showed the old dreams that once at least, and in the 
cold world of print, had come true for her. Now 
her eyes hovered and never came to rest. With a 
rustle of black taffeta she fluttered in at the bidding 
that answered her knock, unheedful, in the feverish 
elevation of her mission, of the dressing gown and 
the bandaged foot that for a brief moment embar- 
rassed her host. 

"Have you tried metaphysics?" she asked 
abruptly, upright and tentative in the chair he 
offered. 

He answered no, hardly aware of her meaning, and 
she hurried on. She was sure it was medicine that 
kept him ill, for all sickness and all evil were only 
illusions. She murmured on vaguely about the good- 
ness of God, the control of matter by mind, and the 
unreality of material things. And then she came 
back to medicine, which somehow seemed the great- 
est evil of all, and terribly real. 

"You must ask me questions," she said. "It 
isn't easy to grasp it all at once." 

What could he ask? He inquired whether she 
wore a cloak in winter, had a fire in her room, 
whether she ate. And she answered very gently, 



A Liberal Experience 59 

catching the drift, "We haven^t got so far as that, 
yet." 

After a while, when he was silent, she added, "It 
is a religion; it is very sacred." And then more in- 
tensely and a little bitterly, "I am reviled here. I 
have spoken to them all, as I must, mustn't I, seeing 
how they suffer from their lack of faith. But they 
go on with their little human schemes to make a 
bad world better, when all the time they keep it 
evil by thinking it evil." 

Someone knocked at the door, and the kitchen 
slavey pushed into the room with a tray of tea 
things. When the pale, slatternly little maid had 
slid away to double her provision the two were 
silent. Something in the pitiable hopelessness of 
this apparition jarred on the visitor's last note and 
made it hard to resume. Before the return of the 
forlorn little wretch with fresh supplies, another 
knock brought in other visitors. The fluttering 
guest rose and said she must go, with a baffled ges- 
ture that made her going almost a flight. 

The new comers were a pair of biologists from 
overhead, man and wife. They had stopped in, 
they said, on their way home, the fog having put 
an end to work. They had heard that he was laid 
up. There was a hesitation in their manner that 
the departed guest was clearly accountable for, and 
a constraint set in that even tea with its ancient 
sociability — it had been finally mustered for three 
— did little to relieve. Only the clinking resur- 
gence of the medicine bottle put them wholly at 
their ease and gave them a point of contact. 

The man was young, with uncouth, roomy clothes, 



6o A Lover of the Chair 

a sprawling figure, and a droning voice. But he 
had hands that were delicate, slender, and deft like 
a woman's, and eyes that needed no supplement of 
feature — wide apart, and keen or dreaming as the 
talk shifted from fact to vision or vision to fact. His 
wife was a girl in years, plain and calm and compe- 
tent, speaking to the subject without the feminine 
consciousness of the listener. They had met and 
loved in a laboratory, and had gone out one afternoon 
and been married by a magistrate. The quiet ro- 
mance of their union still burned in their eyes and 
told in their gestures, whether they talked, as they 
did, of political hopes, or of the large dreams of 
their science. 

When medicine was disposed of and tobacco was 
produced they settled themselves comfortably, di- 
vining the welcome in reaction from their momen- 
tary doubts. They both smoked, the man nervously, 
and his wife with a sedative calm at once homelike 
and revolutionary. 

^'We're a queer lot here," the biologist mused, and 
his wife added, "I dare say you've had a taste of us." 

"I shall hate it when I have to go," our friend re- 
turned heartily. 

"They're good-hearted enough," the scientist went 
on. ''And if they'd stop there it would be a good 
thing for England. Only they won't. They try to 
think. Look at them. No, I'm not personal — it's 
just because they take up these cults and get run 
away with that it isn't like talking scandal to speak 
of them. They move like puppets ; somehow they're 
not their own men. And when you speak of them 
you're speaking of something impersonal and 
threatening — disintegrating." 



A Liberal Experience 6i 

He omitted courteously the guest who had just 
gone, but sketched out others in the house and set 
them forth in clashing collocation — a Bergsonian 
who was for reasoning away the reason, an aesthete 
who was for sentimentalizing life, a pedagogue with a 
modernistic cult of spontaneity, a socialist with a 
dream of industrial bureaucracy, a social worker 
drunk with a vision of syndicalist overthrow, and 
worst of all the eternal gentleman with his static, 
visionless immaculacy and his hopeless content with 
polite manners, polite learning, polite charity, polite 
inanity. There they were, threatening between them 
to smash the only hope of unity that reason held out 
for the future of poor England — and poor America, 
for that matter. That only hope was science. Then 
he sprawled at reflective length in his chair and 
launched the great scientific dream, the praise of its 
discipline, the vision of its gradual absorption of all 
that was now going at loose ends under the care of 
literature, and morals, and politics, and art. 

They left at the appearance of the dinner tray, 
and the doubts that were hovering in our friend's 
mind as to the all-sufficiency of science to take care 
of many of men's aspirations remained there undi- 
vulged. He promised himself to review them over 
his coffee and cigar, but his coffee and cigar were 
shared by the anti-intellectualist and it was impos- 
sible to share with this common enemy the ironies 
that he had for science. For those ironies, after all, 
were sympathetic and not fundamentally hostile. 

The new visitor, with the prospect of two fair 
hours before him, set out to shatter the reason with 
irrefragible logic. The demonstration went forward 



62 A Lover of the Chair 

apace, step by step, interrupted now and again by 
inquiring visitors, who glanced at the guest and 
would not stay, and ended with the reason quite in 
the ruck and discard of the world's rushing progress 
through time. 

The loneliness of the second morning of confine- 
ment was relieved by quite his most welcome visi- 
tor. He was a young man of a reflective turn and 
greying temples, who came toward noon with a mess 
of sausages, and stayed to reveal a very endearing 
nature. He was a writer on Liberal doctrines, and 
eked out a living in several minor lectureships. Our 
friend amused himself by picturing him as a modern 
version of the old Whig pamphleteer. But the 
type had changed, in externals at least. In place of 
the old blind partisanship and the old emotional loy- 
alty that went with the old ideas, there was the clear, 
rational coolness that consorted with the term 
science, which he used to designate his political the- 
ories with. The change was consistent with the 
change from the moral to the economic ends to which 
Liberal theory had been so largely reduced. It was 
beneath this exterior, however, that the old Whig 
still smouldered — in a burning loyalty to the one 
human idea that lay, by faith, in the Liberal prin- 
ciple — the belief in the majority. He had a gen- 
erous hatred of compulsion, a hatred that in someone 
less ardent, a little more aloof, would have played 
hob with his modern Liberal programme of sweeping 
regulation and restriction. His ideas were tolerantly 
put, but there was a brooding undertone running 
through them, a kind of mute anger at the life at his 
elbow, at the perverse spectacle of mad divergence 
that kept men so unsympathetically apart. 



A Liberal Experience 63 

"For all our interests, our best interests," he said, 
"are one, you know, common, co-operative. And 
yet, look at us here " 

But when the pedagogue, with his theories of 
spontaneity in education, came in, he himself was 
fain to go. The spectacle of that demoralizer of 
common foundations and common standards was 
too much for his patience to bear. 

Others dropped in on that day and the next in a 
bright stream of clashing colours — the syndicalist 
with his elan vital, the socialist with his rational, 
hard, schematic, but beautiful Utopia, an Anglican 
priest with brooding loyalty to a waning cause. 

It was on the fourth day, when a warm sun and a 
sudden relief from his malady took him out into 
the crescent, that he met the aesthetic critic of whom 
the scientist had spoken — a short stocky man 
dressed always, morning and evening, in a jaunty 
Norfolk jacket with a flare, a Windsor tie, and ex- 
traordinarily stout boots. The morning invited talk, 
and the sun, or a native bent, or both, charmed out 
of the little man the eccentric tale of his own phil- 
osophy. 

He had got demd sick, he said, of propriety. He 
had seen it until all the world had begun to look like 
a box of puppets with strings pulled by a machine, 
forever the same, without variation, without intelli- 
gence, without imagination. He'd looked behind 
for the operator. Dead! He'd looked for the in- 
ventor. Dead, too! He'd then got out of the box 
himself, and life was a jolly bit more like it outside. 
Here he was, quite alive, and he knew it because 
everything that came into his mind was something 



64 A Lover of the Chair 

new. He had chucked the machine for good and 
all. What he was looking for was life, and life was 
spontaneous — not the same thing over and over. 
As for laws, they were the joke of some devil who 
wanted things to happen always the same way. 
Artists were the people with life as he understood it. 
They needed no laws; the instinct of beauty kept 
them from anything nasty. And then he got on to 
his scheme for social regeneration — a kind of Lib- 
eral anarchy mitigated by aesthetics and propelled 
by impulse. 

It was a little inconsistent that, forgetting his 
principles for the moment, he should respond to his 
own clean impulses and damn the uglifying verses of 
the poet who lived on the top floor of the Terrace, 
and whom our friend had seen once or twice in the 
passage. For himself, the critic did the arts for an 
afternoon paper — and his thumb jerked toward the 
villa that flanked the Terrace. He told then about 
^'Old Flash," his proprietor, owner of a half-penny 
sheet in Fleet Street, that said wicked things about 
the aristocracy at seductive length, and illustrated 
with much bare flesh from the drawing-rooms and 
the music halls. 

He left our friend to musings about ^'Old Flash." 
He remembered now to have seen that gentleman 
from his own window that overlooked the garden 
of the villa. The villa itself was a matter of flaming 
riches and flaming taste, with footman and butler 
and coachman in incredible livery. But the garden 
belonged to another world, and answered to the care 
of a spare and bandy Weshman in inalienable shirt- 
sleeves and flat cap. It was there, in the summer, 



A Liberal Experience 65 

that he had seen a boy of ten for the first time back 
from school, thin and pale, and going about from 
spot to spot watching the gardener with wistful eyes. 
Later the family were on the wing for Brighton, and 
the boy was in the garden going about saying good- 
by to his pony and his rabbit and his dog. When 
they found him he was standing before a prickly cac- 
tus that he had brought from school in his pocket 
and planted in a corner. There was language from 
the pair in the French window, father and mother. 
It came across the pleasant shrubbery harshly and 
brutally, and our friend, from his own window, saw 
the boy's shoulders shrink together as he turned and 
went into the house. And now as he thought back 
on this incident that had touched him so much then, 
it became acutely significant. His habit, right or 
wrong, was to generalize the color of life, to find in 
the private springs of personal character the subtle 
indications of the quality of large affairs. There 
was something sinister, therefore, in this incident, as 
he brooded upon it. His idea spread from the single 
character whom he had seen in the French window, 
out to the infinite repetitions of it in that half-penny 
sheet dropping their indirect suggestions, and tread- 
ing them down day after day into the minds, dull or 
receptive, that made up majorities. 

A kind of baffled, helpless impotence seized him 
at the thought of the uncontrollable forces at work 
against the efforts, generous but weak, of those who, 
like his friend of the sausages, dreamed of a people 
united in a single intelligent purpose and working 
together to a single intelligent end. 

He got up to walk off his restlessness. A distant 



66 A Lover of the Chair 

church bell called back to him suddenly out of the 
past an. older and larger and serener dream of an in- 
fluence reaching out to all men, and working upon 
them from within to bring them together with a 
common and moving impulse. He had a fleeting 
sense that only so, working through character to 
outer expressions of it in social relations, could any 
reform ever make over the life they were all trying 
so desperately to make over. The turmoil of struggle 
to mold it from without, to regulate the expressions 
themselves, leaving the character untouched, or 
touched only with the restive animosities of restraint, 
struck him as tremendously, desperately futile. 

It was perhaps this sense that led him, a few min- 
utes later, to fall in step by genial invitation with 
a minister who cogitated his sermons there, up and 
down on the gravel. In a few more minutes he was 
listening to the curious tale of that shift from Chris- 
tianity to economics that was going on in the 
churches — perhaps more in America than in Eng- 
land — in the name of progress. 

^'Change and evolution are the law of life," he 
heard the ministerial voice saying by his side, and it 
came to him stridently across the quiet of his serener 
vision of a moment before. "And if it is true that 
Jesus did look upon possession as an evil and 
poverty as a good, still we may hardly cling to ideas 
that are outgrown. Christianity is not static; if 
it is to live it must grow with the progress of ideas." 

He was rational and hearty and disposed to talk. 
Our friend put the point of his doubts to him. 

''It is still possible, though," he said, "to despise 
riches and put one's heart on other things. Mightn't 
that attitude still deserve to be called Christianity?" 



A Liberal Experience 67 

^'Historically, perhaps," the other returned. "But 
that would be to stand still." 

''But why, then," our friend pursued, "keep to 
the old term? There is a bit of stability in the name 
that might be got rid of." 

The answer was hard to put at once, delicately 
and directly, but it came at last, out of many words, 
that to give up the term Christianity would be to lose 
much of the credit that the centuries had accumu- 
lated about the sacred name. 

Our friend crept back to his room and meditated. 

"There they are," he mused, almost a year after- 
wards, in a letter to the friend for whom he had 
accumulated this gallery of portraits. "Do you 
like them? For myself I find myself more tolerant 
as I grow older, though I have a good deal of sym- 
pathy for the bitterness of Burke in his old age. I 
suppose it is easier for us, who hate the same things, 
to take them more casually; we have grown up with 
them. At all events, when I come to give up my 
rooms — shut up my box of puppets, as the aesthete 
would have it — I shall go away with a good deal of 
the desolation that comes at parting. 

"But I've watched the comedy almost out; theyVe 
begun to reappear in the same parts, and repeat the 
same speeches, with sincerity indeed — the sincerity 
that makes them so likable — but each one with 
the inner twist that sends him off on his own tangent 
to add his own disorder to the great confusion. 
If it were only a London terrace I could take them 
aesthetically, as the Bergsonian is so fond of recom- 
mending, and I could smile and call quits. But they 



68 A Lover of the Chair 

are more than a London terrace. I have eaten their 
chops and drunk their wine and their beer, and I 
know how separately real they are. But they are 
representative none the less. 

^'Have I played them a little false, to have watched 
them, to let them talk, and thus to be writing to 
you about them. I hope not. If I've looked on at 
the play it has been with sympathy, and if I have 
been amused, or found them wanting, it was no part 
of mine to set up as their director. Even here I 
have no wish to ridicule them. But I have wanted 
answers to certain questions, and I've let them play 
on and the answers have come out. I have seen 
them here, irreconcilable, with nothing but their Lib- 
eralism in common — and only that in common I 
suspect because it has no ideas to disturb them — 
without an education in common, without common 
intellectual standards, without common ethical stan- 
dards, inimical to each other. And I have asked 
them, silently, what they themselves actually believe, 
in the one thing that they can assert to be common 
to their social philosophy — their belief in majority 
opinion. 

^'Well, they don't believe in majority opinion. 

" 'You are aware, sir,' the woman with the fright- 
ened eyes said to me, one day as we sat alone in the 
lounge, 'that we are few here. I understand that we 
are many in your country. But here we are few, and 
little understood. Only yesterday a meeting was 
mobbed in Kent, and everywhere we are ridiculed. 
But for us who know that God in His goodness could 
create no evil, such things only strengthen us in 
our faith.' 



A Liberal Experience 69 

" 'God bless you sir,' the jaunty, good-souled 
aesthete said on another occasion, 'they're a jolly 
prim lot, I tell you. I can't help liking them, for 
they're my own people, but they're as near mum- 
mies as they can be in this climate. The human 
atmosphere here is as dry as Egypt.' 

''I suggested the great English humourists. 

" 'Ah,' he returned, 'the reason England's had so 
many great humourists is because she's had so many 
good subjects. We have some intelligent men, you 
know, and they can't help seeing. But the run of 
them — ah, we go to France for intelligence — or I 
dare say America,' he added out of his goodness. 

" 'Our trouble is,' the scientist explained, 'that 
every upstart wants his son to be a gentleman, and 
sends him off to a polite school where he is to get a 
jumble of dead languages and dead knowledge. It 
isn't only Oxford and Cambridge that are the curse 
of English education, but every public school and all 
the little private ones that ape them and pander to 
the snobbish ambition of people on the make. A 
few here and there break loose and find their way 
into science. But it's a kind of accident with us. 
Our education is rotten. The worst of it is that it's 
the exact expression of our intelligence. By and 
large, you know.' 

"Shall I go on, or does it grow monotonous? 

" 'There are so few,' the social worker complained 
sadly, 'who really are interested. There's a great 
deal of talk and a great deal of polite and fashion- 
able slumming, but only a few people really care. 
When you go down into the East End and see the 
life of it and the mass of it, it is overwhelming — 



70 A Lover of the Chair 

the sense of all that is to be done, and the sense 
that over there to the West and out through the 
whole country those others are shutting themselves 
off from a knowledge of conditions here, or if they 
know are shutting their hearts against a care for 
them. Here among ourselves sometimes we try to 
believe that we have awakaned the world to the 
crime of all this poverty and suffering. We read our 
own papers and go to our own meetings, and fill up 
our lives with it till we get to thinking that all the 
world is as alive to it as we are. But we have only 
to look off to the horizon to see that the world goes 
on much as ever, indifferent, each man the center of 
his own universe.' 

" ^You mustn't listen to most talkers about social- 
ism/ said the socialist. ^They give you a wrong 
notion altogether. They don't go to the heart of it; 
they want more than they've got, and socialism looks 
like the best way to get it. The real thing is a phil- 
osophy and a sympathy, not a grab.' 

"A kind of helpless compunction seizes me when 
I hear these unconscious answers coming out in un- 
guarded moments. They are so human. They speak 
from their hearts, then, and not by book. They are 
thinking not by formula but of the majorities they 
meet and jostle with, the men and women who make 
up the actual world. In an abstract corner of their 
minds they find the majority somehow good, but 
where each one comes in conflict with reality his 
loyalty goes with his idea. He and his forlorn hope 
are right against the world. No majority could 
make them think differently; their consciences would 
rebel. How could the majority change the right- 



A Liberal Experience 71 

ness of their ideas? Each one in the measure of his 
sincerity would have contempt for the one who could 
trim his ideas to suit the wind of popular opinion. 

^'For a time I thought that the Liberal writer was 
an exception. His particular mission is just this 
belief in majorities. But in a by-election in our 
borough in March the majority went wrong. And 
for a moment, as he came in, mud-spattered and 
weary after the count, and flung himself down on 
the couch, a touch of despair seized him. It was no 
comfort to him for me to point out that however the 
majority went the fundamental Liberal principle 
triumphed because the majority had had its will. 

''He had done what Liberalism has not done — he 
had put an idea at the bottom of his faith. He had 
asked that the majority should be right. And the 
majority had defected. They may have been right 
and he wrong. I don't know. But in his honesty 
he could not change his judgment to suit the vote. 
And for the moment as he lay there — and I dare 
say for the hundredth time — he saw as those others 
had seen, each from his own real contact with the 
world, that beneath the willful surface of his mind 
he had no belief in majorities. He caught the dis- 
junction between his fundamental principle and the 
idea itself. 

'' 'And yet,' he said, gathering courage from other 
anchorages of his faith, 'right or wrong, still it is 
best that they should have their own way. What- 
ever they bring on themselves they bring on them- 
selves. It is better than the injustice of compulsion 
that would come from forcing them according to any 
idea.' 



72 A Lover of the Chair 

^'He was tired and discouraged. He got up and 
went away, troubled, unhappy, struggHng with the 
inner conflict, a cloud of bitterness darkening his 
mood. 

"The resumption of the point came later from an 
unexpected quarter. I was visiting upstairs with 
the uncouth scientist of the keen eyes and delicate 
hands, and the smooth-browed, intelligent girl, his 
wife. I had been listening to that vision of life and 
society as an organism where neither crime, nor 
beauty, nor happiness, nor will, nor anything hu- 
man but would find its ultimate niche in the hier- 
archy of some monstrous physics textbook. 

"One doesn't expect too much consistency of men. 
Life has a way of avenging .itself by striking a bal- 
ance and maintaining its humour. One expects to 
find an age of feminine suffragists blossoming out in 
a feminine dress that exaggerates sexual differences. 
He expects to find among physicists a belief in 
ghosts; to find Dukes de Broglie of sublime morals 
and abysmal morality, anti-intellectualists who deny 
the reason and reason out the denial, feeble 
Nietzsches proclaiming the doctrine of force, Rous- 
seaus asserting the inherent goodness of men and 
laying bare their own festering souls. But somehow 
one is struck by the particular instances; and there 
I sat amazed, listening to the virulent tirade of the 
scientist who believed that all life and love and 
beauty and spirit were but mechanical reactions — 
his virulent tirade against the simple concept of sub- 
ordination in social life. 

"His science dissolved when it came home to his 
own will. What he, who pictured all life but as a 



A Liberal Experience 73 

vast mechanism, revolted against, was compulsion. 
His point was the injustice of forcing human wills. 
You know the curious simplicity of scientific minds 
when they step over into the human field — a certain 
credulity of assumption in them. Their charm is 
that they reason frankly; they know how to differ 
without invidious heat. And this evening, lured by 
the argument and by the friendliness of the pair I 
took up the cudgels. 

"Put to it, they believed in government. Be- 
lieving in government they believed in forcing some 
wills. And at last they acknowledged a belief in the 
stronger majorities forcing the wills of the weaker 
minority. But for me as I listened, somehow the 
idea of justice faded before that crude picture of 
the rule of might. They themselves withdrew the 
plea of justice. They dallied for a moment with 
another possibility — that society was an organism 
in which the individual was negligible, that majority 
opinion represented the iinal opinion of the organism 
to which all the members must conform. But in 
that analogy the idea of justice was but dimly seen, 
and the concepts of the organism and the negligible 
individual were too Prussian, lent themselves too 
well to the hierarchic scheme, to linger long in front 
of us. We gave up the idea of justice. It was plain 
that there was no more justice in forcing four men 
against their wills than in forcing five. Justice be- 
longed to the category of the idea and not to that of 
the count. 

"It was the girl, with her clear common sense and 
her touch of feminine practicalness, who shifted the 
majority rule to more stable grounds. 



74 A Lover of the Chair 

" 'Whether or not it is just/ she said, 'depends 
upon the rightness of the idea you enforce. But 
majority rule, as such, is a matter of convenience, 
isn't it? If we have government some wills must 
have their way and others must submit. I should 
say that it was done in the interest of order, simply.' 

''As I sat there under the spell of finality that 
follows the simplifications of common sense, it 
seemed as though the last word had been said. Ma- 
jority rule was a device in the interest of order 
simply. I thought back with humiliation on that 
web of complexities that I had tangled myself in. 
One clear shaft of simple intelligence had done away 
with those probings after justice and wisdom. If 
Liberals had really believed in the wisdom and jus- 
tice of majorities they would have been passive under 
the verdict of majorities. Once the majority had 
decided, further agitation would have been imper- 
tinence. Nothing would be consistent with a belief 
in majority wisdom and justice but to cease trying 
to influence it — to let life drift. No one did believe 
in the essential wisdom and justice of majority 
opinion. It was a device in the interest of order 
simply. 

"Then as we looked at the simplified picture, a 
new perplexity got hold of us. What kind of order, 
we asked. Any kind of submission made for order 
of a sort. The question was, what was to be the 
quality of that order. Was it to be mere mechanic, 
unthinking submission to any haphazard succession 
of ideas the majority chanced to hit upon? What 
kinds of ideas were to be submitted to? And those 
questions plunged us back into the night, for 



A Liberal Experience 75 

Liberalism had no answer to them. It had no idea 
of its own to offer, no principle to organize a con- 
sistent order around. All it had to submit was the 
will of the majority. 

" ^It tries to relieve every one of economic slavery/ 
the biologist said tentatively. 

"But we soon saw that even the perfect accom- 
plishment of that aim left them stranded short of 
their beginning to have an idea. The Terrace in all 
its motley rose up before us — more bitterly, in- 
deed, for my hosts than for me, for against their own 
ideas they felt the terrible menace of all those other 
inimical ideas that the Terrace revealed. And what 
order could come out of that chaos? It was just 
there in that chaos that Liberalism abandoned them. 
What we saw was that economic freedom was not 
the essential element of order. The only order that 
would be tolerable would be a moral order. And 
Liberalism had nothing in its principles to center a 
moral order around. 

"Rather in its approval of anything that could get 
a majority behind it, it seemed to echo the serious 
banter of the jaunty aesthete. I met him in the park 
one day soon after this conversation. 

"'Not wisdom — well, rather not!' he laughed, 
and paused, and I saw him there with his hands in 
his pockets picturing the great British public in his 
favorite vision. Taney, wisdom! And I dare say 
it's no more just for a score of men to force a dozer 
to put water in their beer than for a dozen to force 
a score to put water in their beer. On the contrary, 
I call it dem'd ungentlemanly, might is right, and 
that sort of Prussian thing. But if we've got to 



76 A Lover of the Chair 

have laws, and being poHtical animals I dare say we 
shall go on having laws, the thing is still to have as 
many on their own as possible, and that's the ma- 
jority, and as few as possible knuckling under when 
the strings are pulled, and that's the minority. It's 
one of the beneficences of Providence, don't you see, 
that there are fewer in the minority than in the 
majority.' 

^'I wanted to ask why on their own, if their own 
were so ludicrous as his favourite vision pictured 
them, or they were so unwise as he imagined them. 
But such a complaint would not have reached what 
was the point with him. It was the flashing colors, 
the variety, the quick changes of irregularity and 
disorder that caught his eye and pleased his aesthetic 
sensibilities. It struck me suddenly as significant 
that of all the denizens of the Terrace he was the 
only one untouched by discouragement — the only 
one whom Liberalism seemed to satisfy in the reality. 

"It was the Liberal writer who brought the point 
back to the problem of order. I found him one 
morning in the crescent with his notebook open on 
his knee. He put it up when he saw me, and made 
room on the iron bench beside him. It was August 
bank holiday. There was a low white drift under 
a blue sky, such as makes a pastoral of London, 
sometimes, when there is a blow in the Channel. 

'' 'I dare say we shall have it alone today,' he said, 
and I knew that there was something behind the 
tone of his voice. He was irritated. 'They'll be off 
to the Heath to see the costers,' he went on with a 
glance at the Terrace. And then, after a pause — 
^A curious lot! I'm afraid they'll have given you a 



A Liberal Experience 77 

strange notion of us in England. They've mostly 
gone daft. They are people of one idea — each one 
with his own, you know — and you know how a 
single idea plays hob with weak minds.' 

"He went on about them at irritable length. 
There was nothing petty in his grievance. He had 
an unusual degree of sweet reasonableness in his 
personal nature. But the concrete facts obtruded 
harshly on his principles, and it was upon his prin- 
ciples that his heart was set. 

" What we aim at,' he said in his large way, ^is 
the socialization of life. You have suggested that 
we have no idea, but that is our idea — to quicken 
the sense of social responsibility, to spread the 
practice of social co-operation, to stimulate the con- 
sciousness of the common good. The more wholly 
the people take part in government the more they 
must learn to work together. For order, real order, 
and not a mere mechanic submission, can only come 
from the presence of some consistent and con- 
structive idea, a common standard of judgment, and 
a common ethical criterion — a whole people work- 
ing together. And these people — ' he looked up 
sadly and there was no malice in his eyes — ^look 
at them, each penned up in his little crib of an idea, 
full of mutual suspicion — Old Flash and the priest, 
mental healer and biologist and anti-intellectualist, 
socialist, aesthete, rotten poet, social worker — each 
one absorbed in his own two-penny theory, flying 
off at a tangent, thinking of each other with con- 
tempt, and thinking of the state only when they 
spare a moment from their own interests, or when 
they hope to serve themselves by drumming up a 



78 A Lover of the Chair 

majority for their own ends. What have they in 
common? What do they try to have in common. 
They call themselves Liberals, but they get together 
in nothing but their hatreds.' 

"I quoted a passage from Burke's Reflections an- 
ticipating a time when 'laws were to be supported 
only by their own terrors and in the concern which 
each individual may find in them from his own 
private speculations, or can spare to them from his 
own private interest.' He looked up suddenly, 
startled by the similarity of these old words to his 
own. Then with the distant gaze of his thoughtful 
moments his unseeing eyes rested on a blue-coated 
policeman plodding down the walk beyond the 
palings. 

'' 'The time has gone,' he mused, and I saw him 
dropping back into the style of his lectures, 'when 
we think of laws as resting their final sanction upon 
force, or when we think of force as the outward ex- 
pression of law. Rather we think of laws as the 
outward expression of our governing ideas, the 
codification of our social will and purpose, the overt 
and explicit embodiment of our civilization, enacted 
and published to form the center to which uncertain 
wills and straying purposes may be attracted, and 
about which maturing minds may be formed.' 

"As I gazed after the distant policeman I knew 
that my companion was dreaming his dream. He 
had forgotten the Terrace — Old Flash pandering to 
class envy and hatred, the mental healer closing her 
eyes to evil, the syndicalist subverting order and 
reason, the poet uglifying life, the aesthete under- 
mining moral standards, and all those others riding 



A Liberal Experience 79 

off on their intellectual hobbies farther and farther 
from the centre and from each other, encouraged to 
fly off by a fundamental and pervasive doctrine, that 
social virtue lies not in the rightness of the idea, but 
in whatever can muster numbers behind it. 

'^ 'And meantime,' I asked, drawing him back to 
the present 'to come at the dominance of that 
moving, common idea?' 

" 'Meantime,' he echoed, musing for a moment; 
and then waking up to the curt style of his polemic 
articles, 'meantime it is not a belief in their wisdom, 
and it is not a belief in their justice. It is a loyalty 
to the people in spite of their defects. For it is the 
Liberal belief that men can be educated to common 
standards, that they are persuadable to right think- 
ing.' 

"We were both silent. I thought of the peda- 
gogue upstairs, and the whole movement in edu- 
cation, and how now that majority opinion had laid 
hands upon it education was promptly ceasing to 
lay down common standards, but was diversifying 
itself more and more, and earlier and earlier in the 
child's life, and giving to the young as they matured 
less and less of a common basis of thought and mu- 
tual understanding. 

"I thought again — and ever again — of the 
medley there in the Terrace whose random diversity 
and unbalanced extremity had so roiled the Liberal 
theorist. The Liberal aim had been accomplished 
in them; they were economically free; they were 
persuadable; and they had been persuaded! 

"I left him there, sad, and resolutely hopeful, his 
notebook on his knee." 



8o A Lover of the Chair 

^Tor me the comedy was played out. Have I 
been fantastic, or was the extravagance real? Have 
I made too much of the bare contrast of reality 
with the orderly theory? Merely to play up the 
contrast is easy, and unjust. Livable houses, houses 
with children, come short of the dream of the 
motherly housewife. But the kindly guest makes 
allowances; if he is human he likes the litter and 
accumulation of the homely living-rooms better than 
the flawless and inviolable parlors. But he likes, 
I imagine, to feel the dream of order potent behind 
and beneath the day's disorder — to know that it 
is the day's disorder, and not the week's, or the 
year's — incidental and not organic. 

"Can this Liberal dreamer, with his noble pity for 
suffering and for thwarted longings, and his vision 
of a people unified through common standards and 
common aims, hope to realize his dreams? Or is 
there something incommensurable as between the 
idea and the rule of the majority? The majority is 
not inevitably wise and just, but neither is it in- 
evitably unwise and unjust. At any one moment it 
is a matter of fact. So I have tried to look at these 
people here, so typical, it seems to me, of the great 
restless democracies. I catch the mournful cadence 
of my words, and you may smile; I do myself. But 
I have looked further to generalize the view — to 
see the kind of plays that they encourage in the 
theaters, the kind of sermons they listen to in their 
churches, the kind of books that sell best, because 
they buy them, the kind of men they put into 
office — and the spectacle is not heartening. 

'1 can find no intelligent Liberal who bases his 



A Liberal Experience 8i 

hopes on the present quality of the people. It is a 
trust that they may be persuaded to better thinking 
that feeds the Liberal faith. I have talked to Mr. 
Wells, that arch-dreamer of a better day, and 
beneath his simple kindly manner I have seen a sad 
and sacred anger at the stupidity of human inertia. 
I have seen in his brooding face a sense of impotence 
to make men see the lucid ideas that seem so simple, 
so obvious to him who has spent his years in thought. 
But for the great masses — they are still to be won. 

''Can they be persuaded? More especially does 
the Liberal doctrine tend to persuade them? Is 
there anything inherent in the fundamental Liberal 
principle of majority rule beyond the mechanical 
order that comes from minority submission? This 
is my problem. This is the heart of my quest. 

"For my own part I can find nothing more. Wis- 
dom and justice are not inherent in majority opinion; 
no idea is inherent in it. No moral idea is more 
sacred than the majority itself. Even its consti- 
tutions are coming to be resented as too great checks 
upon its vagaries. The men that make up majori- 
ties, indeed, may be persuaded to moral ideas ; that, 
let me repeat, is the great Liberal hope. But when 
we come to ask what they are to be persuaded to 
through Liberalism, we come to the great contra- 
diction. Liberalism has no ideas so sacred as any 
other ideas that the majority may enact. It has 
no nucleus, no center about which to organize an 
order. It has taken these errant, earnest men and 
women of the Terrace to the end of its tether. And 
there they are, as they are. It has nothing more to 
say to them. Or if individual Liberals plead with 



82 A Lover of the Chair 

them to bring the masses from poverty, even that 
plea aims only to bring the masses into the condition 
of the Terrace itself. It does nothing to bring 
moral order into the intolerable confusion that the 
Terrace itself presents. And so long as that con- 
fusion endures, what real hope is there that even 
that aim may be accomplished? 

^^ Modern Liberalism impresses me with its para- 
doxes. Its avowed aim is to socialize life. But to 
me it appears to work only in the other direction. 
Its influence from the first has been to destroy the 
unifying agencies. Personal loyalty has gone with 
the passing of personal rule; a common ethical stan- 
dard has gone with the decay of religion; a common 
intellectual standard has gone with the democra- 
tization of the schools. And it has put nothing in 
their place. 

"It is a curious thing to notice that the uniform 
dissolution of each of these unities has been in the 
non-moral direction of economics. Under the di- 
rection of majorities politics has become a matter of 
the regulation of business; the church tends to be- 
come a propaganda for the amelioration of the poor, 
and the schools a training for vocation. 

"I know that there are those who can speak scorn- 
fully of the people, and who will point out that in- 
evitably the first consideration of the mass of men 
will be for their bellies. But for my own part I 
can't speak in such scornful terms. Seeing how 
well even the best of men feed themselves if they 
can, I can hardly scorn those who often go hungry 
for wanting to do the same. It is not a case for 
contempt; the economic need fastens on all of us. 



A Liberal Experience 83 

But it is suggestive of the destitution of Liberal 
ideas, to their want of moral principles — I mean of 
course constructive principles looking toward a 
moral order — that their politics, in the very 
broadest sense of the term, should descend to the 
irreducible minimum of economics — fall of its own 
weight to the bottommost level where the bare me- 
chanic necessities of life catch us all. What poverty 
of spirit it reveals! How meagre the appeal to the 
imagination, to the ardent loyalty of youth, to the 
faith that we are something more than animals to 
be fed and kept fat. Do they imagine that by 
paring down our sense of humanity to the economic 
limit we shall care enough about the whole affair to 
be much concerned for the miserable stragglers? 
Don't they see that it is just by centering our whole 
attention upon the economic struggle that the 
economic struggle grows most fierce? Can't they 
see that the mitigation of economic evils comes, not 
from economics itself, but from motives that can 
find no place in their dreary statistics and dismal 
textbooks — that it comes, when it does come, from 
a large and generous sense of the dignity and des- 
tiny of mankind? 

''They say that their aim is to socialize life, to 
animate it with social sympathy, to make the laws 
the nucleus about which maturing minds may centre 
their conception of an eligible life, and to which 
straying wills may conform. But what, in the fact, 
do they offer, what dominant principle to bring the 
many together under a common moral standard, to 
give their lives a common motive and a common 
purpose? No moral idea that the majority may not 



84 A Lover of the Chair 

overthrow at will, nothing to unify that majority, 
nothing to give it a single common aim and tend to 
hold it in that direction. 

^'The people are not to blame. The moral idea 
is personal, the expression of the humane element of 
the spirit; but the majority is large, impersonal, 
mechanical. The Liberals, with their faith in the 
majority, call themselves progressive. Progressive! 
Can there be anything so fixed, so unprogressive as 
the great impersonal average that finds its ex- 
pression in the majority — the elemental beneath 
the roots of our developed differences? It fluctu- 
ates, it sways back and forth within the narrow 
limits, and gives to the myopic the illusion of change; 
and to the myopic change is always progress. But 
in the large it stays the same, and its politics sink 
to the expression of that irreducible minimum of 
wants and desires that affect us all, that mechanic 
pressure of economic need. Is this but a pretty 
theory? The politics of every Liberal nation has 
reduced itself to this minimum. 

''Is there no way out, no movement forward, no 
real progress, nothing but the swaying back and 
forth in rebellion against this force that Liberalism 
renders us into the power of? Liberalism itself rebels 
now at this extreme and now at that; it began with 
laissez-faire till laissez-faire grew intolerable, and 
now it has turned about and is all for regulation and 
restriction. But still we agitate ourselves in the 
mechanic field of economics, and Liberalism offers 
us nothing to lead us out. Nothing can lead us out 
but the moral principle. 

"And now, though you smile, I must offer you 



A Liberal Experience 85 

another paradox. Sometimes I have a gleam of 
penetration into the possibility that it is the fear of 
having a moral principle that is at the center of 
Liberal strength. For a people to have such an idea, 
to govern themselves by it, as a man of character 
governs himself by his principles, would perhaps 
soon grow grievous to many, soon seem to subject 
them to the will of those who still stood loyally to 
it. And if they who still held to it were fewer than 
the majority, the cry of compulsion, of tyranny, 
would rise against them. Not that the majority 
objects on principle to compulsion, or to the tyranny 
of enforced ideas. There is the minority who must 
submit. Moreover Liberalism has become the party 
of the high hand; it has quite gone in for sweeping 
control. One may sympathize with the feeling of 
the majority — at least one may understand it — in 
case it finds the principle maintained but by the 
minority. Why should the few coerce the many? 
Men want their own way, and so long as there is 
recourse to the vote the many may have it, whatever 
the wisdom and justice of the principle. Liberalism 
offers them that — the power to have their own way; 
that is its attraction; that is its strength. The 
valu^ of a principle is its power to guide the will 
when the will rebels, but Liberalism offers none to 
guide the majority when their will rebels. They 
have by Liberal theory — the only Liberal theory — 
recourse to a Liberal principle more fundamental 
than any rational or moral principle. 

'Tor Liberalism is the government, par excellence^ 
of the doctrine of might. Authority shifts with the 
shift of power; it goes with numbers, and not with 



86 A Lover of the Chair 

the idea. Numbers add up into power and not into 
wisdom and justice; and power belongs to the ir- 
rational forces. That is the distinguishing quality 
of Liberalism. And this submission to numbers has 
the appeal of finality — the ultimate decision of 
force. Those who object are eternally of the weaker 
party. But it is the giving up of the human problem; 
for the eternal human problem is the problem of the 
idea. 

" 'What ideas?' I hear you asking. But indeed 
I have not been looking for specific ideas. I have 
only been looking for conditions under which any 
ideas have a chance to be established and main- 
tained. It is not that individual Liberals themselves 
have no ideas. I have read slowly through the po- 
litical writing of the day. It is all avowedly Liberal. 
The best of it is clear, rational, appealing, offering 
pictures of social relations, that seem kindly and 
wise. One may go far before he will find visions that 
are more perfect. But they are not Liberalism. 

'Tor alas — what chance have they of Liberal 
realization? They are wrought out, each one, with 
infinite labour and thought, unified, consistent, their 
details tested by definite standards, brought into a 
system from a stable point of view. Each writer 
has subjected himself to a rigid discipline, holding 
himself steadily to clear underlying principles, 
judging this and that by firm criteria, rejecting here, 
altering there. But dire as his labor is it is simple 
compared with the task of putting it into currency. 
And yet, though as a writer he has sweat blood to 
build logically on the basis of the idea, he must hand 
it over, as a Liberal, to a multitude from whom on 



A Liberal Experience 87 

principle he demands no fundamental idea, no 
common standard. He has built so well because he 
has held himself with infinite pains to an underlying 
moral conception. And they to whom civil life has 
been entrusted have given up judging on the moral 
basis; their criterion is the lot, the finality of ma- 
jority power. 

"In the year here on the Terrace I have come to 
know the Liberal writer well — better than is com- 
mon between men. He has something that catches 
the affection — his human side is out, and it is a 
very likable side. He is serious, but he has humor, 
too. 'I dare say,' he smiled sadly one day, 'the 
trouble with us Liberals is that we make Utopias, 
and think we have been thinking.' We laughed, but 
the quip was profound. 'And even those Utopias 
are not alike,' he went on. 'Our visions themselves 
clash. Until we who make them can agree upon one 
Utopia among us, it is a brave thing to hope that we 
can lead a whole people. Even if our Utopias agreed, 
perhaps it would hardly be a Liberal habit of 
thought to begin from the point of view of our per- 
fect vision, and try to come by our ends through 
regulation and restrictions downward. I'm afraid 
we are still thinking like Caesar — are still autocrats 
at heart. We are benevolent enough. And seeing 
what we think would be good for our people we try 
to foist it upon them whether they want it or not. 
We do it, indeed, by majorities. But how are ma- 
jorities mustered at the best? It isn't assent, but the 
thought behind it that makes a vote liberal. If we 
were Liberal ourselves, we who try to lead, we would 



88 A Lover of the Chair 

want the people to have their own will. Only/ he 
paused, smiling, 'we would want them to want Lib- 
eral things. 

" 'And here I am,' he continued after another mo- 
ment. 'I've swung about through the full circle, and 
I'm ready to begin again proclaiming my Utopia. 
But sometimes here, as we have talked together, an- 
other doubt has got hold of me. Suppose I could 
have my dream, in all its outward perfection, would 
I wish it upon the people as we know them? It has 
been published. They have seen it. There is 
nothing in it that could not be got, peaceably and by 
law. But they haven't brought it about. They don't 
want it. The art critic, your metaphysical friend, 
the biologist, the pedagogue — they don't want it. 
When I think of the multitude of madly divergent 
men and women whom these people t5^ify, I'm not 
sure that I should want it either. I doubt whether 
it would seem Utopian to them. 

" 'I think we have missed something from our Lib- 
eral programme — something that should tend to 
bring them together, not into agreement, perhaps, 
but at least into a common understanding. For now 
what is so egregious is that they don't think alike. 
They have no common mental counters. The com- 
pulsions that would have to be enforced, then as 
now, would seem unjust to them, just as other peo- 
ple's Utopias seem unjust to me, leaving out of ac- 
count aspirations that seem to me very dear to hu- 
man happiness. I'm afraid that we've begun at 
the wrong end. If we are really Liberals and really 
want that last and most precious freedom that we 
prate of — the freedom and equality of the individ- 



A Liberal Experience 89 

ual and the embodiment of his will in the laws that 
govern him — and if we want that will to be Liberal 
and just, we shall have to begin at the other end. 
For after all's said, there can be only one Liberal 
doctrine — such a common and universal education 
as would tend to bring about common standards of 
thought, mutual understanding, collective aspira- 
tion, and a common sense of justice. When that 
becomes our fundamental doctrine, then at last we 
shall become Liberals. The rest would take care 
of itself.' 

"We smiled. Perhaps it was but a moment's re- 
turn upon himself. But he came near in that mo- 
ment, I fancy, to seeing the bottom of the well 
where Liberal truth lies hid. And he put for me, 
from his own point of view, the thought that had 
been hovering vaguely over all my year's floundering 
in the Terrace. As we both stood looking at that 
smoke-softened fagade, I knew that he, as well as 
I, was thinking of that motley array, and wonder- 
ing whether a party, made up of them and their 
like, would ever impose on itself the only doctrine 
that at its heart can ever be called Liberal." 



IV 

A MODERN PARADOX 

IT was after his return from England that there 
occurred in our friend's chambers an event of a 
kind rare enough anywhere perhaps in our none too 
serious, or all too serious century, and certainly 
rare enough in the way it occurred there. In record- 
ing it — after the manner of Thucydides no doubt, 
for there was no reporter present — he followed the 
necessary, courtesy of silence imposed by the times 
concerning a circumstance without which it could 
hardly have occurred. He could hardly record that 
in the generous heat of wine his guests grew elo- 
quent and made extraordinarily long speeches, for 
all that the fine coherence of their ideas and the 
lively interest they all maintained to the end pro- 
claimed a moderation that was exemplary. That 
too, malice might have said, was Thucydidean. 

The four of them who were there, however, dis- 
tributed their seriousness and their levity after their 
own fashion ; they took their wine with a light heart 
and their ideas with a fitting gravity. Or perhaps 
it was not their own fashion either, for they were all 
of them in familiar touch with the past, and no 
doubt drew upon it a good deal in forming con- 
sciously or unconsciously their sense of life and its 
proportions and bounties. Thus they could not 



A Modern Paradox 91 

have been quite unconscious of another occasion a 
long time ago which had its resemblances to the 
present one, and brought them, on this evening, into 
pleasant touch with a great tradition. And they 
could not have brought themselves to frown very 
severely upon the ancient circumstance that of old 
had produced such delightful results. But if they 
thought of this at all it must have been afterwards, 
for what happened was not planned, and sprang 
naturally out of the promptings of the moment. 

If it had been planned it would have been in a 
measure cruel, for the situation that developed be- 
fore the end was not altogether free from pain. The 
four men had indeed much in common below the 
level of their differences, but they had gone their 
different ways and emerged with different concep- 
tions, and these struck across each other at times 
with the sharp clash that for all of them was the 
spice of the occasion. But they held their ideas 
seriously, and one of them shortly found himself in 
an alliance that must have been hard to bear. 

He was the one least known to the others, so that 
if he had come a little shyly among the three old 
friends who had gathered on the traveler's return, 
feeling, with a sensitive nature, a little remote from 
the rest, his separation was the more acute in the 
end. For though he found himself aligned with one 
of the others, it was an alignment full of chagrin 
and bitterness, and left him poignantly alone. He 
was a man of peculiarly gentle disposition, and so 
was removed doubly from the others by the sensi- 
tive manners that kept them from offering the sym- 
pathy that they felt. The bent of his faith was 



92 A Lover of the Chair 

humanitarian, and he was aUied to that modern 
school that kindles eagerly at the sight of poverty 
and deprivation, and offers itself generously to the 
task of remolding an obdurate society. 

Of the others, one was a frank democrat of the 
old intellectual breed, hard-headed, dry, direct, diffi- 
cult to kindle but once alight burning with a good 
flame. The third was perhaps the most interesting 
of them all. He was a Grecian and a historian, with 
a body of tremendous bulk and energy, an explo- 
sive flow of talk, and an eye that flashed at moments 
but at others was serene, aloof, or kindly in its 
quick appreciations or its reflective abstraction. 
Grote was his bete noire — a Whig pamphleteer was 
his phrase for that historian — and served, by con- 
trast, to emphasize the aristocratic leanings of his 
own social faith. 

Their host was the fourth. He had but recently 
returned from England where he had spent a sab- 
batical in reading and reflecting. If in his record 
of what took place on this evening he played no part 
it was rather because he had had his say at previous 
compotations than because in fact he said nothing, 
for his habit was rather copious than otherwise. But 
the situation that developed, and which made him so 
sedulous a recorder, developed without need of him, 
and the report was long enough as it was. An 
October dawn was threatening the east when they 
parted. 

They had had a late dinner and had returned to 
their host's fireside and decanters. Their talk was 
of the problem that the traveler's reflections had 
brought up, and was full of the endless friendly 



A Modern Paradox 93 

clash of their various opinions. It was because the 
humanitarian's point of view was the one most 
provocative — being most current — that someone 
suggested that it be given a full and uninterrupted 
hearing. From that suggestion the rest followed. 
They settled themselves about the table and before 
the fire, and the humanitarian began. 

They were all of them moved by the generous 
ardour that animated his brief exposition, perhaps 
the more so that they saw in his gentleness of tone 
and expression the fine restraint of an appealing 
reasonableness. 

^'I know," he said, '^that you began your demo- 
cratic career as a revolt against aristocracy. I had 
almost said ^we,' and with your consent I will say 
'we' hereafter, for I feel a part of you now, though 
then my fathers were little more than serfs in a 
country that had scant sympathy for that revolt. 
I have naturally my own sympathy for it. I can 
not help feeling, however, that as we have gone on 
through the century and a third since then we have 
preserved some exaggerations that were proper 
enough at the moment of reaction, but which are 
not proportionately important when the moment of 
reaction is over. I mean especially our mode of 
thinking in terms of classes. Democracy nec- 
essarily began by a concern for the oppressed 
classes, but as it became less and less a reaction and 
found itself launched on its own bottom and set out 
on its own voyage the logic of such thinking has 
seemed to me inconsistent. The impulse of democ- 
racy was, after all, at bottom not sympathy with 



94 A Lover of the Chair 

oppressed classes, but sympathy with oppressed in- 
dividuals. And sympathy with the wants and needs 
of individuals is the constant principle of the demo- 
cratic ideal. 

"Democracy must, of course, act by majorities; 
but majorities differ from classes by the obvious 
distinction that majorities are recruited vertically 
through all strata, not, like classes, horizontally. 
And they are created by opinion, personal reflection, 
individual longings and affections. They are created, 
that is, by those aspirations of the individual for 
which democracy exists. If you will think, then, of 
sympathy with the wants and needs and aspirations 
of the individual as the principle that applies pro- 
gressively in all stages of the developing democracy, 
you will, I think, see the point of what I should like 
to say. 

"It is on the basis of this principle that I wish 
first of all to criticise the schools. I mention the 
schools because I think that there more than any- 
where else do we cling, by the inertia of institutions 
and the force of traditions, to that first impulse of 
reaction, and to that mode of thinking in terms of 
classes, which was inevitable at the first leap away 
from aristocracy. And I mention them, moreover, 
because it seems to me that they are the agent 
which can do more than any other agent of democ- 
racy to express its active sympathy — do more, that 
is, to give real force to its underlying principle. The 
rest of the action of democracy is largely the admin- 
istrative routine common to all governments; but in 
the schools it does something fundamental: it gets 
down to the individual who is so appealing to us, 



A Modern Paradox 95 

and gets down to him at the time when he is most 
pliable, when whatever influences are upon him are 
determining the degree to which his wants and needs 
and aspirations can ever be fulfilled. And so what- 
ever is said about the schools is said about democ- 
racy in the large. For the schools, I might say, are 
the democracy — its essence in dynamic action. 

"The schools have, I think we should agree, clung 
pretty close to the tradition which they began with, 
and which they inherited from the older schools of 
the aristocratic society from which we sprang. It 
was natural enough. We wanted in our first re- 
action against aristocracy to give to every one the 
particular things which we had seen him specifically 
deprived of under the old regime. Our thoughts 
were mainly to get away from the hostile shore we 
were escaping from, but we were intoxicated with 
our plunder and we began by dividing the spoils. 
We were not yet calmly settled to the responsibil- 
ities of steering our own course. The schools seem 
to me to be still in the attitude of those early years 
though we have long since ceased to value the par- 
ticular booty that we go on dividing. 

'That old education was a class education. It 
was calculated to fit a few people to a definite 
stratum of society, and to a definite work which 
pertained to that stratified society. It was, for that 
class, a training for vocation. It was definitely 
adjusted to a definite end which pertained uniformly 
to that class. It thought, so to speak, in terms of 
class, and formed the minds of its youth to think in 
those terms. And it was right. It was an adjust- 
ment to definitely perceived conditions. 



96 A Lover of the Chair 

"As for us, however, though those conditions no 
longer hold, and though we no longer need bravely 
to assert ourselves against them, and though we 
have no classes at all, our schools are still in that 
attitude of class self-assertion, and still, instead of 
acting on our own dynamic principle, cling to that 
education that was adjusted to those now dead 
conditions. 

"Now that I am launched among platitudes let 
me utter briefly the two or three others that stand 
in my way before I go on to more specific, and, I 
hope, more stimulating matters. The conditions 
that are changed are these. Instead of a govern- 
ment of the many by the few, we have a government 
of the many by the many. Instead of a class whose 
private business is the public business, we have a 
government by the many whose private business 
is variously something else. Now, the older edu- 
cation did as an education should do: it served the 
whole need of those for whom it was calculated. 
I repeat this obvious truth because it brings me to 
the heart of my own belief in the matter with the 
assertion that our present schools, supported by a 
democracy whose principle is a S3mipathy with the 
wants and needs and aspirations of the individual, 
fail to perform an equally right service for those 
whom they are calculated to serve. They are not 
really serving those for whom the sympathy that 
creates them exists. 

"If I may go on I should like to point out wherein 
and to what extent this seems to me to be true. 
Some modifications have taken place in the schools, 
I know, and, I believe, in the right direction. The 



A Modern Paradox 97 

pressure of conditions has been too strong to be 
wholly withstood; but by and large the schools re- 
main the same. In some respects they should re- 
main the same; children should, in all our views, 
learn their three R's. But now in the upper grades 
and in the high school they fall heir to a set of 
studies that are largely linguistic and literary and 
historical; I need not specify that combination of 
Greek, Latin, French, German, English literature, 
and history which, added to mathematics and some 
science, make up the last half of the usual public 
school course. I should like, if I may, to call this 
course by a convenient name for the moment, to 
avoid the necessity of tedious repetition. The term 
'literary' will serve roughly to designate and de- 
scribe it. This literary course then, it seems to me, 
fails really to meet the whole needs of the democ- 
racy, as it did meet the needs of the ruling class. 
It would be strange that it should meet equally well 
such widely diverse conditions. 

"Among these literary studies there has been in- 
troduced, here and there in recent years, a type of 
study differing widely from them, and devoted to 
particular ends — vocational studies I mean — 
agriculture, mechanics, carpentry, bookkeeping, 
sewing, cooking. I know how the mention of these 
homely, workaday matters jars on the delicate ear. 
Their linsey-woolsey seems coarse after the silken 
fineness of the more elegant studies. The discussion 
seems at once to drop into the commonplace and the 
banal. And yet, if we are democrats it is perhaps 
preponderatingly with such linsey-woolsey wants 
and needs and aspirations that we sympathize. We 



98 A Lover of the Chair 

can not be democratic by sympathizing only with a 
set of wants and needs and aspirations which we 
have arbitrarily and against their will set up for the 
people. We must take them as they are, and 
follow the democratic principle whithersoever it 
leads. 

"Where these vocational studies have been in- 
troduced they exist side by side with the others, 
each kind taking time that might be devoted to the 
other. At the best, however, they are a minor part 
of the whole course, and in most places they have 
not been introduced at all. And so we may think 
of the general situation in the schools as having been 
created by the literary course. If we examine the 
schools, then, we shall see the great mass of pupils 
leaving before they reach the high school, and of 
those who do enter the high school we shall see but 
a meagre proportion going on to graduation. 

"Those who leave before the end of the course 
leave for some reason. They leave, I think, for one 
of two reasons. Economic pressure — poverty — is 
the name of one. As to these, it seems to me that 
the pertinent question is — What has the school 
done for them? The pressure that makes them 
quit school forces them to hunt for work — work 
of the kind that they can get with their youth, and 
their inexperience, and their untrained hands. They 
can not seek apprenticeship; they must have im- 
mediate returns. And I can only ask in sympathy: 
What has the school done for them in their peculiar 
need? Their peculiar need is to be rescued from the 
great mass of the unskilled among whom lie the 
most of our poverty, and squalor, and hopelessness. 



A Modern Paradox 99 

It is but little use to say that the schools have other 
ends to serve. For these miserable ones it serves no 
other end. They have quit it. And in the time 
when it still might have done much for them it 
failed to do the one thing which would have been of 
help. 

"For the rest, they quit because the studies offered 
them failed to hold them. If they are of the kind 
to be repelled by those studies, and to quit school for 
lack of understanding and lack of interest, they too 
are of the kind to go out into the world of work. 
They can be more nice in their search; they can 
pick and choose; but they might have been kept in 
school, have been better informed, better disciplined, 
better prepared for whatever tasks they fall to. And 
of these I should ask: What studies would have held 
them? Obviously not those which are now forced 
upon them. Obviously, if any, it would have been 
those which respond to those interests which drew 
them from school — training in those vocations 
toward which they are now drifting. 

"If we look on the other and still darker side of 
the shield we may see in the world at large — made 
up for the most part of those whom the schools have 
had their brief chance at and failed to hold — in- 
competence and shiftlessness, skilless hands that 
might have felt the simple joys of intelligent labor. 
I do not know that human joy of whatever kind is 
great, or pure, or lasting; but I know of none so 
great, or so pure, or so lasting as this joy, accessible 
alike to the humblest and the highest, of labor in- 
telligently done. But now instead we may see un- 
skill, uninterest, ignorance, and in their trail poverty 



100 A Lover of the Chair 

and destitution. The tragedy of poverty Hes not so 
much in what we see as in our sense that it tends to 
reproduce and perpetuate both itself and the state 
of mind which produces it, in the children whom it 
brings forth in such vast quantities. 

"Our homely democratic sympathy, then, recog- 
nizing the situation, would try to break the vicious 
circle of this inbreeding poverty by adjusting the 
schools to the thwarted needs which lie behind it. 
Though it would admit that no system could do 
away altogether with poverty, yet it would argue 
bluntly against whatever impulses preserve a dis- 
cipline which serves the aspirations of only those who 
need that sympathy least. 

''To this argument from principle it would add 
another based on the necessary practical working of 
the democratic regime. The democracy is of course 
made up of all those who live under it without dis- 
tinction of birth or wealth or aim. But since the 
ideas and purposes of these individuals are of ne- 
cessity various it must proceed in its activities on 
the basis of majorities. It can not put every man^s 
desires into laws. The minority must submit. 

"In the matter of the schools, then, the democ- 
racy should logically respond to the needs of the 
majority. And we have, I think, explicit indication 
of those needs in that great majority whom the 
present education fails to hold to the end. The 
majority must first of all make a living. That is 
their duty, not only to themselves but to their 
children whom they arbitrarily bring into the world. 
And that is their duty to the community upon which 
those children are arbitrarily thrust for better or for 



A Modern Paradox loi 

worse. These children in their turn for the most 
part take their places somewhere in the industry of 
the community — one a farmer, one a bookkeeper, 
one a mechanic, one a housewife, and so on, ac- 
cording to their wants and needs and aspirations, and 
those harder compulsions that arise from necessity. 
And since it is their trained aptitude for their chosen 
tasks that determines their ultimate condition, the 
democracy which would not only govern them by 
the restraints and adjustments common to all gov- 
ernments, but would proceed on its own dynamic 
principle of active sympathy, must, it seems to me — 
here where it has its intimate personal chance to 
express the very heart of its ideal — take its ex- 
pression in adjusting its schools to that all but uni- 
versal need of making a living. Democratic educa- 
tion, then, I should say, is a training for vocation. 

"I hope I may not weary you if I end by re- 
iterating my criticism of the schools as they are con- 
ducted to-day, for I think that we shall never attain 
to a genuine democracy until we have made our 
schools democratic. The present education which 
they afford, wholly or partly literary, I should still 
call aristocratic. I have said nothing of the relative 
values of the two types of studies for those who now 
complete the public school course. But if we should 
suppose that the present course met the wants and 
needs of all those who completed it, yet they are so 
far in the minority that it stands, it seems to me, 
self-convicted of being an adjustment to the de- 
mands of the few. In another sense also it is aris- 
tocratic. It is — pardon my bluntness — a relic of 
an older system that flourished when education was 



102 A Lover of the Chair 

an aristocratic privilege, adjusted to the needs of a 
privileged class. That class no longer exists. Its 
habits and qualities of mind are not to be despised 
perhaps, but they are for the few who have leisure, 
not for the many who must win a livelihood. And 
those few who are to have leisure in our democracy 
can, and in the real world about us often do, obtain 
that education of privilege by private arrangement 
elsewhere. And so the education of our existing 
schools, growing out of an aristocratic ideal, and 
remaining over from an aristocratic regime, may be 
suited to that ideal and that regime, but not to a 
democratic ideal and a democratic regime. As a 
relic, clinging by inertia to the heart of the new or- 
ganism, it clogs the free action of that organism. 
More inharmoniously still it functions in its old way. 
It is an aristocratic influence in the midst of a 
striving democracy. 

''Such is my faith about these matters which I 
believe lie close to the interests of us all. We are 
slowly departing, I think, from that older sense of 
society in which a government was felt to be some- 
thing in itself, distinct from the persons who lived 
under it — an entity apart and aloof. We are 
coming nearer to a sense that it is an arrangement, 
an agreement, between free individuals. And as we 
come nearer to those individuals we perceive that 
in the end it is they individually v/ho are the largest 
conscious entities of which we are aware — they 
individually who think, who hope, who aspire, and 
they individually who feel that happiness, or blessed- 
ness, or, by whatever name, that gratification of the 
consciousness which has never long been supplanted 



1 



A Modern Paradox 103 

as the end of all human action. In democracy I see 
the first tentatives in the direction of that concern 
for the separate man which would seem to be the 
only logical basis of government. Our democracy 
is imperfect: it still thinks in terms of government, 
saying from above what shall be the wants and needs 
of its people; it still thinks in terms of class, edu- 
cating its people according to the aspirations of a 
class. But I see that mode of thought slowly break- 
ing up, and in its place a fluid adjustment to that 
largest conscious entity that can have aspirations to 
be gratified — the consciousness of the individual 
man. 

^'I have spoken of the schools because it is there, 
and there almost alone, that democracy, the essence 
of it, has its chance at the thing with which it 
sympathizes. It is there that it can be more than 
passively tolerant, can be constructively active, can 
make its sympathies dynamic — can, in a word, be 
democratic." 

He ended thus, and the others were silent, stirred 
by that quiet emotion that goes with the voyaging 
intellect. They had listened impressed, each con- 
scious of a sympathy with the speaker that no burst 
of eloquence could have roused so well as the 
simple, appealing reasonableness of his manner and 
his words. And he had set the tone. 

The host turned at last to the Grecian, who sat 
with his great bulk deep in his chair, his eyes resting 
curiously upon the speaker. He was a fighter, 
though a fair fighter, and the others looked with some 
apprehension for the effect upon the gentle humani- 



104 A Lover of the Chair 

tarian of the clash which they anticipated. The ex- 
plosive energy that swept in gusts at sudden mo- 
ments across his speech, was often disconcerting. 

"I must speak," he began, ''in a sense from a 
place aloof and apart, and speak of what I would 
have rather than what I expect to have. For every- 
one is agreed that the organization of society that is 
called aristocratic has had its day; and though the 
term has a derivative meaning that is not without its 
appeal, it has, if I may use the expression, a derived 
meaning that justly, perhaps, has made it abhorrent. 
It is, at least, so far in the realm of lost causes that 
unless I can win to my aid the forces of humani- 
tarian sympathy — which I conceive to be the de- 
termining influences of the time — I must be ex- 
onerated from seeming to plead for an order in which 
I have personal hopes of distinction." 

The humanitarian smiled frankly, and they all 
joined him, relieved, seeing in the unwonted gentle- 
ness of the Grecian's manner and the quietness of 
his restraint the delicacy with which he had adjusted 
himself to the tone set by the sympathetic humani- 
tarian. 

''I am not willing wholly to forego, however," he 
continued, ''the pleasantness of that derivative mean- 
ing of aristocracy, though that meaning is largely 
ideal. We are speaking to-night of ideals. But there 
is a distinction which I should like to make before 
going on to its defence. I utter it for my own warn- 
ing, hoping that if I put it into words it may keep 
me from falling into the worst error of doctrinaire 
theorists. It is not infrequently said that it is un- 



A Modern Paradox 105 

fair and illogical to compare an ideal with an op- 
posing reality, contrasting the crystalline perfection 
of the one with the living defects of the other. And 
this fallacy I find myself constantly and com- 
placently guilty of. But in escaping from this fal- 
lacy it is easy to fall into a slough of futility in com- 
paring ideal with ideal. I suppose that with all of 
us our social ideals in their purity are methods of 
human perfection. And so since our ideas of hu- 
man perfection are not likely, for us here, to vary 
widely, there is danger of the inanity of comparing 
equally perfect things. I take it, however, that no 
living institutions are perfect — that defects and 
deteriorations are inevitable, however flawless the 
ideal. The quality of the living institution depends 
upon the quality of the human nature that governs 
it; and to admit the frailty of human nature has 
always been men's chief comfort. And so when we 
make a choice of systems or institutions we make a 
choice of probable defects as well as a choice of 
good. Life is, in this sense, a matter of a choice of 
evils. Our logical task is not, then, the comparison 
of ideals, or of ideals with realities, but rather, in so 
far as possible, to discover the probable mean, and 
compare attainables with attainables. 

^'I must, however, speak first of the aristocratic 
ideal, for it is the one thing sufficiently stable to 
base my structure upon. I need not search for this 
ideal beyond the word itself, and I affirm it to be, 
as the word implies, government by the best. I 
need not dwell long upon such familiar ground, but 
before I go on to its defence I should like to men- 
tion the equally familiar form which this ideal has 



io6 A Lover of the Chair 

normally taken. It has never, historically, quite 
lived up to Plato's description of the aristocratic 
organization, but it has largely resembled it. In 
that description there is the provision, so hard to 
democratic ears, that men shall tend to remain in 
the condition to which they were born. The aristo- 
cratic order of society is the arrangement of the or- 
ganism, with definite and stable gradations from 
bottom to top. And at the top are those who, by 
leisure, by training, by freedom from the narrower 
cares of livelihood, and by a kind of specialization 
in the large relations of humanity, govern the or- 
ganism and set the standard and the tone for the 
whole. This is, in very brief, the aristocratic ideal. 

"I mention this in the beginning, and mention it 
thus bluntly, for I wish at the outset to strike the 
harshest note in the harmony to which this system 
tries to attain. The reality itself is not so harsh as 
the ideal — a relationship which I suspect to be re- 
versed in the democratic regime. I might point out 
that in the aristocracy from which we democratically 
rebelled the roll of its great men has from the earliest 
times largely traversed this ideal stability. Black- 
stone boasts of it. Whatever softening effect this 
fact may have, however, upon the severity of the 
aristocratic ideal, and whatever corollaries might be 
drawn as to the conditions which produce great men, 
I shall pass over them for the present because of 
another significance which I see in this traversal of 
the aristocratic system — that aristocracy adapts 
itself to human nature as it is. Its premises are 
reality, not a faith. 

''I should like you to examine this reality at the 



A Modern Paradox 107 

base of the structure. Democracy is founded on a 
belief in the perfections of human nature; aristoc- 
racy, on a sense of its imperfections. Aristocracy 
builds upon the imperfections even of those in whose 
interests it seems to be established. And now you 
will see, perhaps, another reason why I was so eager 
to avoid a comparison of ideals and a comparison of 
perfections. Aristocracy, based upon sordid reality, 
would, in such comparisons, seem dull and grey be- 
side the glowing colours, the moving ideality of the 
democratic faith. I could hope but little to touch 
your sympathies. 

"This, however, is by the way. What I wish to 
point out is the underlying fact — that democracy 
is based on ideals and aristocracy on realities — that 
democracy builds upon its ideals, and aristocracy 
builds toward its ideals. That is why, as I conceive, 
real aristocracies have always been of slow growth 
while democracies have sprung up in sudden revolts. 
The one is based upon the more permanant traits 
of human nature, and the other upon sudden bursts 
of enthusiasm stirred by the nobility of a generous 
conception. Democracy rises while that enthusiasm 
is at white heat, and lasts until it cools. Then as 
the democratic impulse dies, and the normal range 
of human qualities and defects regain their normal 
proportions, the tendency sets in again toward aris- 
tocracy. I should say that if this is true aristocracy 
has a deeper, more solid, more permanent, and surer 
foundation than democracy. 

''All this, however, has in itself, I am aware, a 
theoretic ring. To bring it back to actuality, then, 
I should like to cite the realities upon which aris- 



io8 A Lover of the Chair 

tocracy seems to me to be based. If the best-laid 
plans of men go agley because of human weakness 
and imperfections, I can hardly cite more relevant 
realities for the starting point of any scheme than 
just these weaknesses and imperfections. It is upon 
a calculation of these realities that aristocracy is 
based. 

The greatest of them is, perhaps, the one we have 
just considered in another light — the impermanence 
of generous motives as compared with the constant 
and inevitable pressure of selfish motives. If we 
are to have government — and I suppose that we all 
contemplate government in our schemes — some one 
must attend to its administration. Government is 
hardly a simple task that can be done offhand. It 
must contemplate the whole range of complex human 
relations that hold within the wide scope of a nation. 
And if just and equitable action is hard to attain to 
in single instances, as it is shown to be daily in the 
law courts where the circumstances are simple and 
defined, the just and equitable administration of the 
far more complex affairs of a whole people will re- 
quire a great and penetrating wisdom. 

"To meet this demand an aristocracy — I speak 
of the accomplished fact, for aristocracy is the result 
of slow and natural adjustments, not of deliberate 
plan — provides selfish motives for those who train 
themselves for the arduous duties and responsi- 
bilities of government. It gives them honour, rank, 
title, wealth, leisure, and it gives them freedom to 
pursue the widest variety of individual aspirations. 
For this class the public interest is its private inter- 
est. To maintain its privileges it must train itself to 



A Modern Paradox 109 

maintain its power. And since in the nature of the 
case the members of this class are few, it must main- 
tain its power by qualities of mind. They become 
a specialized class whose business it is to govern, 
and to cultivate those finer aptitudes and percep- 
tions and appreciations which are necessary to the 
understanding of the varied interests and relations 
with which they have to deal. 

"I know that there is something exasperating in 
this frank manner of putting my case — that aris- 
tocracy builds upon the sordid realities of human 
self-interest. It seems to try to take the wind from 
the sails of criticism. None the less I have fallen 
into it because it seems to me to grow out of the 
reality of the situation. I should, I think, rather be 
ashamed of it if it were but a device of my argument. 
But in the mixed quality of human affairs I see in 
this unlovely reality of human selfishness at least 
the virtues of permanence and stability — virtues 
imperative in solid foundations. Aristocracy, how- 
ever, justifies itself, not upon the basis from which 
it builds, but upon the quality of the product at 
which it aims. It is because I believe that an aris- 
tocracy has a higher aim than a democracy, and has 
a more reasonable chance of accomplishing its aim, 
that I believe in the aristocratic order of society. 
Let me then try to justify myself by explaining this 
aim and this reasonable hope of its accomplishment. 

"Out of the selfishness of these underlying mo- 
tives, and out of the leisure and training which they 
provide, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that a 
finer product can emerge than is possible in a regime 
in which everyone has to divide his interests, and 



no A Lover of the Chair 

having to make his way by some narrower pursuit, 
must devote time and interest to it that might be 
devoted to the larger cultivation of his mind. This 
statement sounds harsh, I know. It is harsh. But 
I think it is simply the harshness of truth. It is 
possible to doubt, I suppose, whether this concen- 
tration upon the wider interests, the larger relations, 
of humanity will produce a more perfect understand- 
ing of them. Yet I believe that none of us do doubt 
it. Even the humanitarians have assumed the prin- 
ciple that specialization makes for a more perfect 
understanding and greater ability in those whom he 
would train for more intelligent labor. It is but 
logical to suppose that a body of people who can be 
relieved of other necessities and can thus devote 
themselves to this wider discipline will attain to the 
qualities it aims at more perfectly than those whose 
discipline is divided. 

'^It is perhaps more reasonable to doubt that this 
particular type of attainment is a nobler thing than 
that of the dual discipline of a democracy. Yet I 
believe that you have no real doubts even here. 
You believe that to grasp the wider relations of life 
requires a finer type of mind. At least in every or- 
ganized activity or trade you put the finer mind at 
the head where the larger relations have to be mas- 
tered and governed, and you consign the individual 
tasks to the simpler minds. If this is so — if we do 
feel this larger grasp to be the nobler thing — I 
think that it is not unreasonable to suppose that a 
system which disciplines its rulers to a more perfect 
grasp of this nobler thing and tends to make their 
ideas prevail will produce a more perfect civilization. 



A Modern Paradox iii 

This is the end proposed for itself by an aristocracy. 
This is the attainment upon which it rests its justifi- 
cation. 

^'Certainly we could hope for such an attainment 
if other things were equal. But it is the aristocratic 
belief that other things are not equal, and that that 
inequality is in favor of the aristocracy. In the 
large it is said to be the biological tendency for kind 
to reproduce kind. If this is true, then those who in 
the slow evolution of an aristocracy have become by 
qualities of mind members of the ruling class will 
tend to reproduce others of the same kind. But I 
should not hold to this. It may be after all that by 
gifts of birth one class is much like another. Even 
so, however, the subtle influences that surround a 
child born to this class can not in a sense but fa- 
miliarize him from birth with the broader and nobler 
type of consideration. And when we know that this 
child, whose thoughts from the cradle have been 
formed on these broader lines, is put for many years 
through a formal discipline on these same lines, we 
may expect from the class to which he belongs, 
made up of others of the same training, a higher 
type of accomplishment than could come from the 
general mass of the democracy whose training has 
perforce been divided. It has specialized, so to 
speak, on the noblest range of human thought, 
prompted in a large sense by the same motives that 
drive the citizens of a democracy to specialize on 
narrower lines. And so I think we may expect from 
it the cultivation of a finer product. 

'1 know that this contemplates a corresponding 
restriction upon the rest of the people of an aris- 



112 A Lover of the Chair 

tocracy. But an aristocracy looks to degree and not 
to quantity. If it were possible to add the wisdom 
of two men together, or of a million men, as it is 
possible to add their strength or their wealth, then 
a class might be wiser than its ideal teacher, Plato's 
disciples wiser than Plato, as a regiment is stronger 
than its colonel; and a democracy might be wiser 
than an aristocracy. But faculties of the mind are 
a matter of quality, not of quantity, and no amount 
of lesser degrees added together can equal the attain- 
ment of a single mind cultivated to a higher degree. 
''There is, then, to stimulate this high degree of 
attainment, the strong motive of self-preservation, 
or class preservation. And there arises, too, out of 
this situation a class consciousness by which a code 
is established — a code of manners, of honour, and 
of intellectual attainment. In following this code a 
man may have no higher motive than to identify 
himself with his class, but this motive is, I believe, 
one of the most powerful known to men. The devil 
of loneliness has us all in his grip, and moves us, 
through the devices of speech, or dress, or badge, or 
manner, or attainment, to proclaim our affiliations — 
to cry out to all the world that we belong. 

"Collectively for the aristocrat there is the need 
to keep this code purified and elevated, both because 
successful policy is founded on clear thinking and 
sound principle, and because pride of place and 
self-respect are most permanently founded on solid 
grounds. Stimulus to develop, coupled with oppor- 
tunity to develop, and these joined to a select pubHc 
opinion that gives a high aim to that development, 
and all this disjoined from any need to truckle to 



A Modern Paradox 113 

the untrained simply because they are many and 
powerful — these influences, I believe, will make 
for a higher degree of attainment than the influences 
that hold in a democracy. 

^'I am not without my own smile at the colors of 
this picture that I have drawn. None the less I 
have laid them on wittingly, believing that they 
paint certain tendencies that do not exist, or do 
not exist in so high a degree, in a democracy. I can 
not see in the democratic theory provision for just 
these ends which to the aristocrat are the noblest 
aims of society. And in the democratic reality about 
us it seems to me that as we recede farther and 
farther from the aristocratic tradition there is less 
and less provision and less and less concern for these 
ends. 

^'In a democracy it is the average that obtains 
rather than the best. For a time after its founda- 
tion, while the aristocratic respect for the best still 
tinges the habitual thoughts of the many, they try to 
elevate to positions of trust those who by quality 
and training are recognizable as superior. But as 
time goes on and the many realize more and more 
their own will and their own power, they grow mis- 
trustful of a superiority which they do not under- 
stand. And they put into power those who, they 
believe, more nearly resemble themselves — or more 
likely and worse, the clever and unscrupulous who 
can flatter and deceive them into such a belief. 
Then, as they see the corruption of the incompetent 
or unscrupulous whom they have elevated into office, 
they refuse to take it as an evidence of their own 
unwisdom, but come more and more to mistrust the 



114 A Lover of the Chair 

institution of representative and deliberative gov- 
ernment. They demand that legislators and ex- 
ecutives cease acting on their own wisdom and be- 
come the automatic mouthpieces of the popular will. 
In time they go still farther and demand the count 
of noses in the recall and referendum. At this stage 
they have ultimate assurance that the ideas that are 
enforced shall be the spontaneous average of the 
wisdom of the community. 

''Now it is inevitable that this average shall be 
less elevated, less wise, than the best — even than 
the best existing in the community. For the com- 
munity may be supposed to contain the normal range 
of humanity, from high to low; and averages are 
inevitably lower than the highest. If democracy is 
the expression of the average it is the establishment 
of mediocrity. Democracy is mediocrity. It is so 
by its own theory. 

"I can think of no injustice deeper or more sweep- 
ing than the condemnation of a whole people to the 
levels of mediocrity. It is inbreeding. It forms a 
vicious circle. Youth grows up to it. The educa- 
tion of the masses responds to it. Literature and art 
cater to it. And these influences in turn intensify 
it. The finer minds must sink toward it or be with- 
out influence. As I look about me at the democracy 
I see only confirmations of this belief. I see less and 
less concern for the nobler thoughts and attainments 
of the past, more and more catering of the school to 
the lower wants of the people, more and more popu- 
larity for mediocre books and mediocre plays. 
Mediocrity is in the saddle. It rides roughshod 
over the finer aspirations of those who are, as many 



A Modern Paradox 115 

are, above the average; it tramples the nascent pos- 
sibilities of many who might, by inborn traits, rise 
to the nobler levels of thought; it destroys the fine- 
ness of the spectacle of life for those who are born 
to inferiority. It is a ruthless swashbuckler among 
the refinements of life. It is a tyranny. 

"An aristocracy justifies itself, not primarily on 
personal grounds, but upon the belief that the ideas 
which it makes prevail are finer and more elevated 
ideas than the average ideas — not the ideas of 
mediocrity but the ideas of the best. It believes 
that the reaction of these prevailing finer opinions 
upon the community is in reality a more elevating 
and nobler influence than that of the opinions of the 
democracy — that it tends to create a finer populace. 
It establishes standards. It raises the whole people. 

"In the ideal organization of an aristocracy, with 
its classes below the governing class in nice gradation 
from the bottom upward, every function of society 
would tend, by virtue of specialization, to be per- 
formed more perfectly. Is this hard upon those 
below the top? If it is, still here is the striking 
point — that we have the spectacle of such an actual 
gradation in the democracy about us. It seems 
harsh indeed to recognize such subordinations by 
law; but the reality remains the same. And the 
aristocratic condemnation of every man to a par- 
ticular range of development — reprieved in cases 
of exceptional ability or promise — has personal 
compensations in the more perfect discipline which 
it involves. Happiness is not the result of particular 
definable circumstances, but of the nice adjustment 
to circumstances. 



ii6 A Lover of the Chair 

"No actual aristocracy, moreover, has been so 
rigidly organized that exception has not been pos- 
sible where unusual ability has made an actual mal- 
adjustment. Chaucer's father, they say, was a 
liquor dealer; Woolsey's was an Ipswich butcher. 
Even Plato's ideal organization made provision for 
such shifts. And so, however harsh the aristocratic 
scheme sounds in cool exposition, there is some 
reason to believe that in the attainable reality there 
would emerge a higher average quality, a greater 
personal happiness, and perhaps a surer elevation of 
talent and genius, than is prevalent in a democracy. 

"Your ruthless aristocrat, building thus not solely 
upon an ideal, but trying to get the best out of hu- 
manity as he finds it, with its conflicting weaknesses 
and aspirations, sees another fact in the reality be- 
fore him that relieves his possible compunctions. 
He sees that the wants and needs and aspirations of 
the great mass of the people — to omit those ex- 
ceptions of which I have just spoken — correspond 
strikingly with the position to which aristocracy 
would condemn them. They might, and no doubt 
would as they do even now, rage in personal resent- 
ment against the asserted superiority of those who 
were above them; but they do not want the qualities 
that create that superiority. They want what they 
now have, only in greater quantity; and it is to this 
that aristocracy would condemn them. 

"In looking into the evidence of this dark saying, 
I come to the most painful part of my defense. I 
know, however, that you will forgive my bluntness. 
You smiled when I began by saying that aristocracy 
was a lost cause unless it could win to its aid the 



A Modern Paradox 117 

forces of humanitarian sympathy which are the de- 
termining influences of the time. Well, they have 
come to its aid. The training for vocation which 
they would substitute in the schools of the democ- 
racy in place of the literary studies is just the train- 
ing that genuine aristocrats, if they had their way, 
would force upon the many as the quickest means of 
creating their aristocracy. 

''The aristocrat believes, let me repeat, that the 
best form of society is one in which every part is 
trained to fill its own niche and perform its own 
function — one man a shoemaker, another a farmer, 
and so on throughout — and at the top those whose 
training has been broad enough to enable them to 
see widely the whole field, and control the relation- 
ships between the specialized parts. It is, to repeat 
the comparison from your own practice where you 
are really concerned for the fineness of the product, 
the organization of the factory. The method to that 
end, in the slow, imperceptible growth of aristocracy, 
would be to train a farmer to be a farmer, a me- 
chanic to be a mechanic, and so on throughout, dis- 
placing with instruction to that end the wider dis- 
cipline which would tend to direct his mind to larger 
and more universal matters. The more narrowly is 
he limited to a training for the one niche which he 
is to fill, the more snugly will he fill that niche, and 
the more will he be dependent upon that niche for 
his place in the social scheme. He will fit no other 
niche. He will be fixed in that one place. He will 
be subordinated to those who, disciplined to a com- 
prehensive view of the whole, will have the direction 
of the whole. Vocational training is a training for 



ii8 A Lover of the Chair 

that end. It is par excellence the aristocratic edu- 
cation." 

He paused for a moment after the heated flow of 
his talk, and when he resumed it was in a quieter 
tone. 

"You have felt, I think, that the aristocratic ideal 
is heartless. And yet I believe that it may claim for 
itself all the sympathy which the humanitarians 
claim as the basis of their modifications of the 
schools. The humanitarians would act in sympathy 
with the wants and needs and aspirations of the 
many, and consulting them find that they want and 
need and aspire to those things which vocational 
training can bring them. The aristocrat too would 
respond to just those wants and needs and aspira- 
tions. He believes them to be genuine. He believes 
that the mass of the people are right even though 
they do deceive themselves by calling this demand 
for vocational training democratic. They have a 
way of calling what they want by names which they 
like. It is a flattering deception, but it does not 
alter the facts. 

"If they want democracy they must want the 
general spread of those qualities of mind which 
make for a wide grasp of the relationships which 
hold within the broad range of a whole people. But 
they do not want those qualities. And their in- 
stinctive wants are right. They know, if not re- 
flectively yet definitely and instinctively, that they 
are not fitted for those larger views of life demanded 
of those who control and those who create and en- 
courage the finer products of the human spirit. 



I 



A Modern Paradox 119 

What they want, as we have but now been told, are 
things of the body. What they are able to ap- 
preciate are jobs and things measurable in money. 
They have no fitness and no desire for those things 
which the literary studies of the older education 
aimed at. Not all, there are many noble exceptions, 
but in general. They have tried them in their first 
reaction against aristocracy, asserting that the es- 
sence of democracy was the universal right to those 
things which the aristocracy had reserved for itself. 
But they have not really wanted them — the things 
themselves. And as they have come farther and 
farther away from the impulse of reaction, and have 
realized more and more their freedom to have what 
they really want, they have chosen according to 
their kind, chosen the things which they had before, 
chosen the things which a ruling class would give 
them again. 

"Incidentally they have justified the aristocratic 
contention that a permanent democracy is im- 
possible — that the movement of democracy, after 
its first spiritual reaction, is inevitably toward the 
cultivation of its lower needs. It disguises these 
needs in elevated phrases. It speaks of the dignity 
of labour. It proclaims the equal worthiness of all 
necessary tasks. It idealizes a standard of living. 
And it settles itself to the systematic gratification of 
its sensuous wants, leaving the cultivation of the 
spirit again to the few. Insensibly thus, amid the 
shouting of its old sacred words, which have little 
by little lost their old meaning, it slips back into 
the control of those who have cultivated their gen- 
eral intelligence. 



120 A Lover of the Chair 

''It looks back to the founders of the democracy 
from whose ideas it has defected — its Washingtons 
and its Hamiltons — and calls them aristocrats be- 
cause their idea was to spread to everyone the ideals 
that had before been the possession of the aristo- 
cratic few. It chooses for its present leaders those 
who assert the rightness and nobility of its own 
tendencies. They hasten its progress in the way it 
is going. Once it has become self-conscious of its 
own desires, hearing them put into words by its 
leaders, it puts them into accelerated effect in its 
training of the young. This is the decisive step. 

'Tn the end the thing to do is to do nothing. Aris- 
tocracy springs from evolution, not from revolution. 
The democracy by its own will, though blindly and 
in self-deception, is bringing about the end which 
the aristocrat desires. It is training its children to 
take definite niches in the social scheme by limiting 
the training of their intelligence to the narrow range 
of specialized tasks. It calls this training "educa- 
tion," believing by hearsay that education is the 
bulwark of democracy. It has forgotten that when 
this truth was uttered the word education meant the 
broad training of the intelligence by those disin- 
terested studies which direct the mind toward the 
larger relations of men. And going forward in this 
blind and mistaken faith, it is narrowing the outlook 
of its children by centering their attention upon a 
narrower and narrower range of ideas as they re- 
form the schools more and more on vocational lines. 
It does, indeed, soothe its conscience by giving them 
incidentally a superficial smattering of many things 
of the higher order — language, government, his- 



A Modern Paradox 121 

tory, sociology — but its heart is not there. They 
emerge with a false sense of having mastered what 
only a long and dire discipline can give them the 
foundation of; and their shallow, jejune, and con- 
fident utterances but confirm the belief that that 
little had best been unlearned. Gross ignorance is 
not so insidious. Still the thing to do is to do 
nothing. This training not only fits them better to 
their little niches, but it makes them content. It is 
better than the Roman way of keeping them quiet 
with bread and circuses. Instead of being a drain 
upon the treasury it gets work out of them, and in- 
creasingly efficient work. 

^'Such is my defence. And if in the end I find 
myself shoulder to shoulder with the humanitarian, 
whose gentle and generous sympathies have won us 
all, I should like to share in the approval which those 
sympathies command. Though I have proved my 
partisanship by another route I have come to the 
same conclusion in the end. I believe that an aris- 
tocracy would make for a happiness far more real 
and permanent than does the present order of 
society. The unrest, the uncertainty as to where 
one belongs, the chagrin at finding oneself too near 
the top of the table, the offensiveness of those 
clamorous to assert their equality, the elevation of 
the unworthy, the vaulting ambition that o'erleaps 
itself, the unskill that finds no joy in labour, the 
precariousness of the disinterested pursuits, the ab- 
sence of organized encouragement for the nobler 
activities of the spirit — all these causes of unhap- 
piness aristocracy would tend to reduce. It would 
have its own tendency to self-indulgence and the 



12 2 A Lover of the Chair 

relaxation of its exigent standards. But there would 
be its own selfishness to spur it on to the only means 
it would possess for maintaining its own power and 
privilege — the cultivation of the mind to a gen- 
uine superiority. 

"From such a class, setting standards of taste 
and intellect, the better products of art and litera- 
ture could be assured of encouragement which the 
democracy seems less and less inclined to extend. 
If truckling there were, it would be a truckling to 
minds that were trained, not to minds that were un- 
trained, to a class with cultivated standards, not to 
a mass with no standards. The leaders of the nation, 
looking down from an assured position, would no 
longer have to call things by wrong names to win 
the suffrage of the ignorant — would no longer call 
ability to read, literacy; apprenticeship, education; 
glibness about art, culture; governmental aid to 
private interests, democracy. Spades would be 
spades, and the implements of thought, words, could 
retain their real value to the rescue of clear thinking. 

"For these reasons and for many more I believe 
in aristocracy. And in this belief I cast my vote 
with the humanitarians in favour of that training 
of the people to vocation, which marks the final 
departure from the democratic ideal, and the in- 
ception of the aristocratic evolution." 

He ceased, and they sat staring at the fire. The 
host glanced at the humanitarian and read in his 
face, perhaps out of his own mind, a chagrin that 
contained no resentment, but no less a chagrin, that 
pulled at the corners of his mouth, and held his eyes 
in brooding concentration upon depths far within 



A Modern Paradox 123 

the glow of the fire. He had a fleeting sense that 
the aristocrat had been too hard upon his gentle 
victim, followed by a surer sense that nothing but a 
love of fair play could have led him to impress so 
harshly upon the generous humanitarian the de- 
ception by which he was guided. 

The pause which followed was so painful that 
when the moment of precipitancy was past the host 
turned to the democrat of the older school. It was 
understood by now that they were to have it out 
from all sides. 

''Will you let me," he began somewhat briskly, 
relieving the tension of the moment by his dry, 
driving manner, "will you let me state my whole 
case even though it covers ground that has been trod 
more than once to-night? There will be an ap- 
pearance of repetition, but there will also, I think, 
emerge differences that can best be detected in their 
logical setting. And these differences are the bent 
of the twig. 

"As to my own plea, then — curiously I have 
found myself, as I have listened to the defence of 
the humanitarian movement and the defence of 
aristocracy, more often agreeing with the aristocrat 
than with the democrat — with his logic I mean. 
Yet curiously again, in the end it is they who are 
partisans and I who stand alone. The alignments 
are strangely complex. 

"I am democratic in my social faith. I too be- 
Heve that the constant character of democracy is 
its opposition to the aristocratic suppression of the 
masses. I have, therefore, no love for aristocracy, 



124 A Lover of the Chair 

but I believe that it had among its evils some very 
real virtues. It accepted responsibilities. My 
criticism of aristocracy, even if I could approve its 
fundamental theory, would be of its human tendency, 
from which democracy is not free, to self-indulgence. 
If we are, therefore, as has been said, to compare 
attainables with attainables, I need not, I think, 
cite specific examples to show that revolts against 
attainable aristocracies have taken place because of 
their tendency, in spite of the selfish interests that 
make in the opposite direction, to relax the rigours 
of their discipline and indulge their personal and 
more selfish inclinations. The results of such self- 
indulgence seem to me so much worse, so much more 
unjust, in an aristocracy than in a democracy that 
I must, though I had no counter-theory of my own, 
side with the latter. I must defend myself, then, by 
examining the grounds of this partisanship. Let me 
go hastily over the preliminary commonplaces. 

'We commonly speak, I know, of a man's doing 
himself an injustice. Yet I think we attach a very 
different moral value to such an act from that of an 
injustice to some one else. It is this difference which 
moves me in the comparison we are now concerned 
with. That privilege should go with responsibility 
as reward of work is just enough. That privilege 
should mount at the expense of work, as in the 
aristocracy from which we have broken, is natural 
enough. Its consequences would be even tolerable 
if the ones who attained the privilege paid the cost. 
In an aristocracy, however, with every decline in the 
sense of responsibility the common people are the 
ones who pay with suffering, and with every increase 



A Modern Paradox 125 

in self-indulgence the common people are the ones 
who pay with contributions and exactions. That is 
why, on the whole, a democracy is fairer and juster 
than an aristocracy. For though a democracy is not 
free from the same human weaknesses it has to 
suffer the penalties itself. Though in both cases it 
is, I know, simply individuals who suffer, I have 
not made a distinction quite without a difference. 
For in a democracy those who suffer have power of 
redress. Whether they use their power is not the 
point. Democracy gives it to them, and aristocracy 
withholds it. 

''There is another injustice in an aristocracy even 
more serious than the first; and this brings me to 
the main premise of my argument. By the theory 
of its organization it distributes privilege and re- 
sponsibility by the accident of birth, and in the 
same process passes over all those who by the same 
accident are born among the mass of the people. 
That kind tends to reproduce kind is a principle 
that one is, I think, at liberty to doubt in the deli- 
cate matters of mental and moral aptitude. Great 
men have not normally had great sons. Even our 
aristocrat has said that England's great men have 
emerged from the classes below the top; and if this 
is true of greatness I think we may suppose it equally 
true of lesser degrees of human value. A system, 
then, that in any way tends to limit or curtail or 
suppress the very thing for which human organ- 
ization may be supposed to exist — the cultivation 
of all attainable human values — seems to me to be 
mocking itself with contradiction. An aristocracy 
does, by its own theory, exert such limitation. 



126 A Lover of the Chair 

"Even the large social loss of this suppressive 
action might be borne with nothing more bitter than 
regret if it did not involve something far more in- 
tolerable. I mean injustice. I am grateful to our 
humanitarian for that passage in which he spoke of 
the individual as the largest conscious entity of 
which we are aware, and the largest unit which could 
rejoice or suffer or have aspirations. For when we 
look at society minutely we find that the moving 
thing, the thing that touches our hearts most nearly, 
is the individual man. And though we may give 
names to classes of people, and talk of them coldly, 
we have, when we come to the individual, come to 
the final goal where justice or injustice has its reality 
and stirs our eager approval or our burning resent- 
ment. And the mass of the people is made up of 
these appealing individuals no less than the ruling 
class. 

"When therefore we look at the people as indi- 
viduals, possessed of dreams and desires and long- 
ings and hopes for all those things which men have 
thought worth striving for — honours, distinctions, 
knowledge, wisdom — the injustice of thwarting in 
all but a few these noble aims that are common to 
all men seems repugnant to every democratic soul. 
One irreducible individual would seem to have as 
strong claim upon opportunity in his brief life as 
another. Accident has brought him here or there. 
He has but one chance at life. And to thwart that 
chance arbitrarily, on no basis intrinsic to the oc- 
casion, is to commit a bitter and irreparable in- 
justice. 

"It is the stirring sense of this injustice that has 



J 



A Modern Paradox 127 

roused men from time to time in all ages to fight for 
democracy against aristocracy. It was the sense of 
this equality of right to opportunity that produced 
our own Declaration of Independence, smiled at so 
superiorly to-day, and which led our fathers to 
rebel against a tyranny that seemed to deny it. 
This, then, was the democratic idea, the impulse 
that has ever stirred generous spirits to rebel against 
the arbitrary repression of the people — to spread 
to everyone the opportunities that in an aristocracy 
are the privilege of the jew. 

"This was the essential aim of our democratic 
revolution; but it was based on an idea still more 
fundamental. It was belief that the people wanted 
these opportunities and were worthy of them that 
supported the heroic protest which lay at the found- 
ing of the democracy. For given a people known 
not to care for those nobler ends which universal 
opportunity opens to them, or known to be too 
deeply sunk in their own sensuous wants to be 
worthy of generous self-sacrifice, and who would 
turn a finger to secure democracy for them? The 
democratic faith is not that a base people should in 
justice have what they want, but rather that our 
particular people are a people of noble aspirations 
and should not be thwarted of their liberty to de- 
velop the nobihty that is in them. Democracy is at 
bottom a faith in the nobility of the people. Not 
that by the wildest dream all the people of a democ- 
racy could be expected to desire those nobler ends, 
but that the essential democratic action is to give 
everyone a chance — and a chance at those things 
that only the few had before. Not that all will 



128 A Lover of the Chair 

want them, but that the whole mass is leavened by 
those who do. 

"I pause at this point, for here I have diverged 
from the conclusions drawn by that modern humani- 
tarian sympathy that has such an appeal for us all. 
I have diverged, because my own sympathies are not 
so unqualified. They are for the individual, it is 
true, but not for the individual in all his wants, 
high or low. They are for the individual in his 
aristocratic deprivations. As democratic S5mipathies 
they must be for the individual deprived of par- 
ticular things. There could be no democratic point 
in a sympathy for wants that were already fulfilled. 
Democracy must feel for wants that were denied. 
I can conceive a sympathy for the man in all his 
wants and needs and aspirations, but I cannot be- 
lieve that that is democracy. I know that such is 
the current and popular definition — that democ- 
racy is the government that expresses the will of 
the whole people, no matter what that will. But 
such a definition can hardly be wholly true. Some- 
thing in our right definition must reside in the 
nature of the will. For if, for example, — I take 
not impossible suppositions — the will of the people 
should be to establish an aristocracy or to enthrone 
a ruler, we could hardly call the will or the act 
which carried it out democratic. The will of the 
people must be of a particular kind. Something in 
our definition of democracy inheres in the nature of 
the ideas upon which the people act. 

"The essential nature of those ideas, then, the 
nature which makes them democratic, I can conceive 
to be only this — that a noble people aspire to noble 



A Modern Paradox 129 

things of which they have been deprived; that this 
deprivation is unjust; and that the distinctive demo- 
cratic action is the opening up to their attainment, 
not of the things which they had before — there 
would be no point to that — but of those things 
which an aristocracy had closed to them. Such, as 
I conceive it, is the essence of the democratic faith. 

^With this animating idea in mind, then, I should 
like to make some applications and defences which 
I believe are not impertinent, before I go on to what 
I may call the practical necessities of democracy. 
Our humanitarian has spoken of the schools as the 
principal agent in the dynamic expression of democ- 
racy. I suppose it is the schools that give the most 
effective expression to whatever political philosophy 
holds among a people. I can see no other point for 
governmental schools. And but now, as our friend 
traced the aristocratic influence of the vocational 
schools, the sense of their power intensified my own 
conviction as to the kind of discipline the democracy 
would needs establish if it wished to remain a 
democracy. 

''In the aristocratic regime, with the masses of 
the people held to their places in the grand hier- 
archy, the severest deprivation and the bitterest in- 
justice lie in the restricted range of their education. 
Specialized by a ruling class to insure in them the 
greatest amount of efficiency and to get out of them 
the greatest amount of work, they are limited in the 
range of their finer human possibilities by the nar- 
rowed bounds in which their growing minds are 
exercised. No aristocracy, to be sure, ever quite 
wholly enforced such restrictions, but the tendency 



130 



A Lover of the Chair 



was in that direction, and to the degree to which it 
succeeded was due the generous force of the demo- 
cratic protest and reaction. In the pursuit of its 
own ideal, then, the democracy estabHshed schools 
to spread to all, to the degree to which they wished 
to take advantage of it, the opportunity to gain this 
larger and more comprehensive vision which was 
before the opportunity of the few. It opened up to 
them the wider ranges of thought, and gave them 
the chance to be more than the half-men they had 
been. Democracy for its own part has never suc- 
ceeded wholly, but its attempt has been in this di- 
rection; and the degree to which it has succeeded 
has been the degree to which it has justified its 
ideal as against the aristocratic ideal. 

^'It opened up to them history, and the facts and 
significance of human experience. It opened up to 
them literature, and the facts and significance of the 
dynamic traits of human nature. It opened up to 
them language, and gave them access to the thoughts 
of other peoples. If these revelations had no practi- 
cal bearing on the problems of making a livelihood, 
it was not the making of a livelihood that the people 
had been denied by an aristocracy. These revela- 
tions gave them something really democratic. They 
had the value of disinterestedness; they disciplined 
the democratic mind in a type of thought unbiased 
by the consideration of profit or of momentary ad- 
vantage. They constituted a culture that lay at the 
base of the broadest and noblest development of the 
human spirit. They gave to the many the specific 
thing of which they had been aristocratically de- 
prived. They did the particular thing which it had 



A Modern Paradox 131 

been worth while to fight for, perhaps to die for, in 
the revolution which had made the democracy 
possible. 

"In the older regime the people worked: they 
cooked, they sewed, they farmed, they sold goods 
over the counter, they kept books, they built houses, 
each man to his last. But the large expansion of 
their minds among the data of all humanity, and in 
the nobler ranges of disinterested thought, was no- 
where provided for. For the democracy to give 
them vocational training, then, to train them to the 
narrow range of data and relations that inhere in a 
single trade or industry, with the aim of fitting them 
to make a living in that industry — for it, in other 
words, to give the people what they already had, 
only to intensify the narrow bounds of their in- 
terests by early specialization, and then by calling 
that training ^democratic' to soothe those simple 
minds untaught to detect the fallacies in ideas be- 
yond the range of their special training, seems to me 
to be deeply false and deeply wrong. 

"All this, done in sympathy with the wants and 
needs and aspirations of the people, may be a wiser, 
and juster, and finer thing than democracy. But 
such a sympathy is not democracy; it is sympathy. 
It is universal; it faces in every direction; it has no 
distinctive aim. As for democracy, I have tried to 
say what its aim is. It, too, is animated by sym- 
pathy with individual men, but it sympathizes with 
a particular variety of their needs — with the 
harshest of their deprivations. It tries to give them 
their human right to develop to the utmost their 
human possibilities. 



132 A Lover of the Chair 

"Yet perhaps I have been too hasty in my 
criticism. Perhaps, just as democracy is moved by 
a desire to spread the opportunity for spiritual de- 
velopment, humanitarianism is moved to spread 
material comfort. The plea for vocational training 
is open to such interpretation. It may in the end 
prove true that their wants and needs and aspira- 
tions are material ; that the people are not fit for the 
training of their spirits. Such a belief may be well 
founded; but it is not a democratic belief. 

"Have I, in all that I have said, been reading into 
democracy too spiritual an ideal? Have I been 
ignoring the historic Stamp Act and the commercial 
impulses of our own Revolution? Have I, shielded 
from the bitter pressure of common needs, been 
speaking like a closet philosopher, imputing to the 
many, wants which they do not feel, and aspirations 
of which they have never dreamt? If I have I can 
see no point in democracy. For certainly democracy 
is not the agent best suited to material ends. A 
people fitted by exclusive training for particular 
tasks will become more efficient in industry and 
commerce. Efficiency is increased by division of 
labour and the specialization of the parts. Aris- 
tocracy, then, is the regime for that end, for aris- 
tocracy is more efficient than democracy. And no 
doubt the parts are even more physically com- 
fortable, perhaps even happier, each fitted to its 
niche and rewarded according to its fitness. If our 
sympathies for the physical welfare of the parts 
predominate, then this specialization is the course 
our action will take. We will make our schools vo- 
cational. We will train our masses to special trades. 



A Modern Paradox 133 

We will discipline them in material efficiency. But 
we shall not be acting on the democratic principle. 
We shall, as was said, be drifting toward aristocracy. 

"If a man were only an animal, then his physical 
ease would be enough. But he is a man. And it 
seems to me that democracy has no point save as 
it does something that an aristocracy cannot do for 
the distinctively humane part of him — for his spirit. 
I think it is not to be questioned that a youth trained 
in the schools to be a farmer will be a more efficient 
farmer than one who has spent the time of that train- 
ing in history and Latin and mathematics. Yet some 
price must be paid for spiritual development. And I 
can see no distinctive idea in democracy unless it is 
that to give to everyone some degree of spiritual de- 
velopment is worth the price of lesser material effi- 
ciency, even a lesser physical comfort. Such, I 
believe, is the animating idea of democratic edu- 
cation. I can conceive no other. 

"I have come midway in my defence. I have de- 
scribed what seems to me the ideal that animates 
and justifies the constant democratic reaction against 
the aristocratic tendency, and determines the dis- 
tinctive purpose of the democratic government. 
And I have applied this principle to the schools es- 
tablished to accomplish and to perpetuate the demo- 
cratic ideal. My position may have seemed ar- 
bitrary. One of you on behalf of humanitarianism 
has said that the people do not want the broad de- 
velopment of their spirits, and the other on behalf 
of aristocracy has said that they do not want it. 
Both have affirmed that they want what the aris- 
tocracy has always condemned them to, — jobs and 



134 A Lover of the Chair 

the lower offices of life. As a democrat, however, 
I have no ground to take but a belief that the hu- 
manitarian and the aristocrat are wrong. I disagree 
with you, arbitrarily perhaps, but the point is one 
upon which whatever position one takes, whatever 
way one faces, he does so arbitrarily. He takes his 
ground on the basis of a spontaneous judgment. 
Democracy is a faith. I may have reasons which to 
me seem sufficient; but in the last analysis I know 
that I have taken my ground, as you have taken 
yours, by virtue of a faith that is in me. 

"If I may be allowed this faith, then, what I go 
on to say will, I think, seem reasonable. I have 
come to the consideration of democracy as a practi- 
cal thing. An ideal is futile without practical action. 
Democracy is not only an ideal; it is a government. 
This may be a commonplace, but its truth was no- 
where recognized in the exposition of the humani- 
tarian regime. Aristocracy and democracy both 
provide in those who rule a discipline which trains 
their minds in the broader relations of men. Indus- 
trial humanitarianism fails to provide for the ad- 
ministrative wisdom of its rulers. The affairs of a 
democracy must be carried on, and they must be 
carried on by somebody. Somebody must have the 
necessary wisdom. And wisdom lies only in men's 
minds. Since in a democracy, therefore, its ma- 
jorities are responsible, it must discipline these 
majorities in the kind of wisdom which makes for 
administrative effectiveness, and effectiveness in the 
democratic direction. 

"The relationship between the discipline of these 
majorities and the democratic government is too 



A Modern Paradox 135 

obvious to need more than passing illustration. 
Upon the quality of the discipline which gives them 
their judgment and taste will depend the quality of 
the men whom they elect to office, the quality of the 
laws which they enforce, the quality of justice, the 
nature of the public policy, the kind of literature 
encouraged by their reading, the type of life en- 
couraged by their example, the quality of the theater, 
the quality of the arts, the quality of scholarship 
endowed and encouraged, the beauty of the cities, 
the grace of social life. Above all, upon the kind of 
discipline by which their judgment and taste have 
been determined will depend the very discipHne it- 
self by which that judgment and taste are to be 
perpetuated in their children. 

"That is why the schools are a governmental in- 
stitution. In so far as they have any point in the 
practical workings of a democracy they have it by 
virtue of their service in disciplining the majorities 
of a democracy in the kind of wisdom needed to 
guide them in the democratic path. In this matter 
something may be learned from aristocracy. The 
aristocracy disciplines its governing class in the 
broader field. And though the problem of democ- 
racy has its striking differences from the problem 
of aristocracy, they are differences so far from re- 
lieving it of the necessity of jealously disciplining 
its citizens to a large and generous wisdom, that they 
cry loudly for a yet more rigorous discipline in that 
wisdom. One of you has mentioned the aristocratic 
disbelief in our ability to maintain this discipline. 
Democracy is, we may agree with him, immeasur- 
ably harder to maintain than an aristocracy. It has 



136 A Lover of the Chair 

a people trained to wider interests than the lower 
classes of an aristocracy, a people less compactly 
organized, more restless, more shifting. And to 
govern them it has no class set apart, trained to rule, 
stimulated by selfish incentives, rewarded by honor 
and privilege. As a problem, then, it requires a 
higher intelligence to solve, and those who disbelieve 
in it do so on the ground of a disbelief in the power 
of a whole people to make the necessary self-sacrifice 
and train themselves, at the expense of their private 
interests, in the type of learning necessary to the 
wise direction of affairs. 

"But a belief in democracy is incompatible with 
this doubt. Democracy believes in the moving 
power of its ideal, and in the existence of a dynamic 
generosity in its people, or it is not democracy. It 
believes that these are sufficient to take the place of 
rewards and privilege and honor. A democracy 
must believe these things, for these beliefs are 
democracy. 

"The second difference, already implied, is that, 
though the whole people are responsible for its wel- 
fare — its policies, its justice, its civilizing activ- 
ities — they cannot be disciplined exclusively to 
meet these responsibilities. Each man has his 
private interests and duties calling him strongly, and 
he must bring up his children to similar conflicting 
duties. This conflict creates the fundamental prob- 
lem of practical democracy, just as it creates, with 
specific variations, the fundamental problem of all 
government. 

"The gist of the matter is then that these two 
types of interest clash, and that in a democracy, 



J 



A Modern Paradox 137 

with no governing class, everyone must make a 
sacrifice of private to public service. This sacrifice 
is the price of its democratic liberties. Moreover 
the respective disciplines for these ends conflict. 
Training for private interests has been explained to 
us. It is concentrated upon a narrow field, with the 
end in view of material returns. For the public 
interest the discipline must necessarily be broad and 
fundamental, with the end in view of habituating 
the mind to a disinterested perception of things as 
they are — of training the mind to think with clear 
judgments upon those data and those relations which 
hold, not in a single field but in all fields — not in a 
single task but in the comprehensive task of the 
whole nation. 

"The need of this latter kind of discipline is 
sufficiently obvious. And I can find no logic that 
will let me conclude that training in the data and 
relations of a single trade will make for as broad 
and deep a wisdom as discipline in matters that lie 
at the base of all relations of a people — human 
nature, human thought, and human experience, as 
revealed in literature and history. Where else is 
the citizen to gain a large political wisdom? It was 
in this broad discipline that aristocracy trained its 
rulers. It trained them to no especial tasks, but by 
traditions founded upon a sense of the ends to be 
attained, gave them an education which informed 
them of the best that had been thought and done in 
the past by men in all countries and in all ages. It 
trained them to minute and careful thinking in this 
broad field. It did not teach them to farm their 
estates, or to make shoes or bridges, or to cook, but 
rather to control the large activities of the nation. 



138 A Lover of the Chair 

"It may have failed. It is the democratic behef 
that it did fail. But if it failed, it failed not because 
it learned its large lesson too well but because it 
grew self-indulgent, and having power, abused its 
privileges and neglected its responsibilities. It failed 
because it did not learn its large lesson well enough. 
Somehow the democracy must learn those lessons 
which the aristocracy neglected. Somehow it must 
discipline its responsible majorities in that broad 
grasp of human relations which makes for admin- 
istrative wisdom. That is the practical democratic 
problem of education. 

"Democracy has no other practical object to serve 
in its schools than to solve this problem. If the 
people cannot specialize, after the manner of a 
ruling class, and can as a whole get but a part of 
that discipline at best, that would not seem a reason 
why that part should be done away with; rather a 
reason why it should be cherished and intensified to 
the utmost. Knowledge and wisdom are not the 
kind of thing that once attained can be handed down 
from generation to generation like heirlooms. They 
exist nowhere but in individual human minds, and 
to be maintained have to be re-created there from the 
ground up in every generation. As a consequence 
there can be no slackening of the educative process. 
Nowhere more than here is eternal vigilance the 
price of liberty. The practical needs of the democ- 
racy, then, coincide with the ideal needs, for the 
broader wisdom of which the people were deprived 
is the same wisdom that is needed for the govern- 
ment for which they are now responsible. 

"Even more strikingly true is the converse of this 



A Modern Paradox 139 

conclusion. In a democracy, where the citizens 
have private interests distinct from the public in- 
terest, the chief public danger lies in the over-devel- 
opment of private interests. Therein is the chief 
enemy of democracy. I need not point out in con- 
firmation our trusts, our corporations, our municipal 
conditions, our lobbies. For the democracy, there- 
fore, to suffer the lessening of that discipline of its 
citizens which is so necessary for its wise adminis- 
tration, is to break down its chief safeguard. For 
it further to accede to their selfish demands and 
substitute a training which makes in each man for 
an intensification of his own private interests, is a 
governmental action making directly and blindly 
for its own undoing. At one stroke it is removing 
the safeguard and strengthening the enemy. 

^'Democracy has no enemy to fear but itself. 
Government by the few has the eternal menace of 
the suppressed many. But government by the 
people need fear nothing but its own will. It may 
do what it pleases. It may insensibly change its 
desires; it may follow an altered will to the forma- 
tion of a new regime. But if it desires to remain a 
democracy it must safeguard that desire. It must 
fortify itself against those selfish interests which 
everyone must possess, and which by democratic 
theory everyone should possess. It must by a 
liberal and disinterested discipline impart a generous 
conception of the spiritual idea of democracy, and 
impart the wisdom that is necessary to the wise ad- 
ministration of its affairs. The theory of democratic 
education, then, is that it should bring up its youths 
in that generous conception, strengthen their gen- 



140 A Lover of the Chair 

erous desire for its service, and train them in an 
abiHty to grasp and administer its affairs in harmony 
with that generous conception. For it, therefore, by 
direct and conscious action to weaken the discipHne 
of that part of the man which serves the democracy, 
and by the same stroke to strengthen that part of 
him which conflicts with the democracy, is to make 
by far and deep reaching influences for its own 
destruction. 

"I have said that self-indulgence, the use of pub- 
lic power to private ends, and the decline of the 
sense of public responsibility, have marked the 
downfall of aristocracies. Until a moment ago, how- 
ever, I had felt a blind security for the democracy 
thinking that though the whole people might grow 
self-indulgent there lurked no enemy near to rise 
up in revolt against the evils of its decadence. I 
had not seen that though the democracy need fear 
no revolution it declines no less surely when the 
generous spirit of its own natal impulse dies. If in 
the end that spirit does die, it sickens first, like the 
spirit of aristocracy, at the entrance of self-indul- 
gence. In the democracy about us there is evidence 
that the moment of sickness has come. There is the 
use of public power to private ends, the decline in 
the sense of public responsibility. Even the little 
time asked for discipline to public service is be- 
grudged, and that time is turned over to private 
ends. Instead of self-devotion to public service, on 
the part of the many, the many are bending the 
public service to self-devotion. 

^'Still, though I am not blind to the discourage- 
ments of the moment, I have not lost my democratic 



A Modern Paradox 141 

faith. I believe that, given a people of intelligence 
such as ours, it is possible to make a democracy 
nobler and juster than the aristocracy from which 
we have sprung, and toward which, as has been 
shown us, we are, alas, beginning to turn again. I 
do not think that it is too late to face about and 
pursue once more our own proper course. But 
whether we want to face about, now that we have 
tasted the poisonous sweets of self-indulgence, I do 
not know. One of you says that we do not; the 
other says that we do not. 

^'I believe that the one essential thing in the 
maintenance of the democracy is the broad disci- 
pline of its youths. And when I look at that dis- 
cipline I see it gradually narrowing. I believe that 
the one enemy of democracy is the private interests 
of its people. And when I look about me I see that 
instead of strengthening its discipline to counteract 
the force of these interests the democracy is bending 
its discipline to their enhancement. When I search 
in obscure corners, hoping to find remnants of the 
disinterested pursuit of wisdom so necessary to 
democracy, I see it wholly dependent upon private 
generosity, retreating to private foundations. With 
the masses of the people narrowed in their educa- 
tion to particular tasks, and bent in the habits of 
their minds to an exclusive regard for their private 
interests; and with the few who are not so special- 
ized disciplined — like an aristocratic class, by 
private endowment — in the broader learning that 
is needed for a grasp of the complex relationships 
of the whole, I can see only a slow trend toward 
aristocracy. 



142 A Lover of the Chair 

"Still I have not despaired. I believe that the 
democratic spirit may survive the stimulus of those 
oppressions from which it revolts, and may recover 
even from its present sickness. But I believe that it 
can survive only by the broad, disinterested dis- 
cipline of its youths — a discipline which will take 
them when they are young and generous, give them 
the deep foundations of that nobler development of 
which in such moving numbers they were once de- 
prived, habituate their minds to the disinterested 
outlook from which clear thinking and generous 
action spring, form them in the liberal wisdom of 
the ages, and teach them the wide relations between 
men, which lie at the base of a wise and moderate 
administration of the interests of their people." 

He ceased, and they sat again in silence, smoking 
and gazing at the fire. Two of the four of them, at 
least, were saddened by the thoughts of the 
evening — by the dangers which threatened the 
generous interests which they had so nearly at heart, 
and by the subtle and complex relationships which 
their oppositions and their no less disconcerting 
agreements had revealed. It was, therefore, with 
chastened spirits though with genuine warmth of 
friendship that they uttered the commonplaces of 
good-night. 



V 

IN PURSUIT OF THE ARTS 

I. CUDGELS AND COMMON SENSE 

IT was a revealing touch to our friend's quality 
that as he grew older it was his tolerance and 
not his crabbedness that should have increased. He 
grew more sociable, more dependent on the world, 
by virtue of the humanity that had always lain be- 
hind his militant front. The militant in him had 
leave to cool with the passing of years. It was 
still in reserve, indeed, as events showed, but it no 
longer went about with its sword drawn. He took 
more time now to go about, and more people dropped 
in on him for talk. In the circle about him it was 
said that he improved. He did; but he spoiled the 
effect of this comment for one informant by laugh- 
ing that it came, after the manner of the world, only 
when he had stopped improving. Obviously he 
was still the ironic observer. 

And he was observed. Acquaintances saw him 
one winter haunting the galleries and picture shops, 
an attractive figure, grown a little thicker with 
middle age, amenity in the slight stoop of the neck, 
and vigor in the erect shoulders. His face was 
brooding rather than animated, and only when the 
eyes were looking into yours did you catch the 
something lucidly human in him that was at once 
both boy and man. The eyes lingered, upon you 



144 A Lover of the Chair 

at the time, and afterward, when he had gone by, 
in your memory. It was said that women hated 
him for the truths he told, and still clung to him as 
a staunch friend. 

His going about this winter among the show 
windows of Bohemia was a genuine quest. He was 
interested in beautiful things for their own sakes, 
as the phrase is, and that would have been enough. 
But it was characteristic of him that he should in a 
measure complicate whatever point of interest ab- 
sorbed him; and his interest in art was thus com- 
plexly the ramification of something else. He was 
unable to take it simply, because for him its re- 
lation to that something else was its thrilling point. 
He had a passion for seeing life whole, for catching 
its proportions. His ancient grievance was that a 
fine sense of proportion was the rarest thing in the 
world — yes, in both senses. 

When therefore after a certain autumn exhibition 
he had caught himself sliding into the seductive sun- 
set land of aesthetic speculation and reading, he 
brought himself up with a sharp tug at the reins. 
Certain of his friends promptly rallied him for what 
they called his Puritanic uncomfortableness in the 
presence of beauty. He acquitted himself of such 
a charge, however, and with a good deal of good 
evidence. His discomfort came from another source. 
He found his ancient grievance against the confident 
h5^ocrisy of the five senses grumbling back into 
consciousness, like an old rheumatic wound. And if 
he could take it now a little more serenely, as time 
will inure its victims even to pain, still there were 
moments when it made him wince and cry out. And 



In Pursuit of the Arts 145 

if he did cry out now and then, so that his bare 
words, repeated, would sound harsh, one who was 
present and who had a grain of salt in him would 
have caught in the light of his eye and the tone of 
his voice the saving spark of humor that turned 
his railing complaint into but a negative way of 
picturing his own vision. 

His temper, for all its amelioration, was the fight- 
ing one still, and the fighting temper perforce holds 
in a kind of tolerant contempt the passive enjoy- 
ments of peace. That is the peculiar angle from 
which its owner looks out upon the world. He will 
forever have his dragon to fight. And however 
much he values the palace, it will be upon the 
dragon at the gate that he demonstrates his devotion. 
To be content with the positive depiction of his 
notion was what, at the cost of peace, our friend 
therefore could not bring himself to. It was too 
tame a sport; it drew to itself too many of the 
slothful and the self-indulgent. 

It was in part the spectacle, especially in the arts, 
of beautiful talkers who lived parasitically by foster- 
ing a cult, and the great horde who on their side 
responded to the flattery of it, that won his active 
disgust. But more particularly it was his old love 
of seeing life whole, of seeing it in measure and 
proportion, that sent him back characteristically to 
the center for a perspective. He could not escape 
from the sense that life was a matter of living and 
that the center was the conception of a decent life. 
It was there at all events that he took his perpetual 
refuge. 

The literature he had just been through was an 



146 A Lover of the Chair 

amazing mass. It had no help for him at all. It had 
brought into its service a whole gamut of appeal — 
cleverness, eloquence, sentiment, gossip, and 
romance; and many kinds of treatment — aesthetic, 
scientific, historical, archaeological, and metaphys- 
ical. But aside from a characteristic beauty of 
binding and print it was wonderfully barren. He 
was aware of thousands of honest painters, and 
sculptors, and musicians struggling at their work, 
Two or three he knew, at home and abroad, and one 
who had won fame in two continents. But they 
were silent — talkative enough at night in the studio 
with glasses clinking — but silent and hard-working 
over their brush or chisel or score. And they had a 
kind of tacit hate for the great horde of cult 
mongers. 

^'Don't you read the literature of your subject?" 
he had asked one of these friends one day as they 
lounged through the Louvre. 

The other looked at him quizzically for a moment 
before he replied, and then, — ''Certainly — here," 
he said, and his hand waved at the walls of the Salon 
Carre. In a moment he added, ''Biography, of 
course, and history. You belong to your own 
metier, and you want to know it from the bottom. 
But the rest — " He gave a gesture that together 
they had seen and loved in an excursion they had 
taken together in old days into Bohemia — the 
geographical Bohemia — a wringing of the hands 
on wilted wrists, that pointed utter though whimsical 
despair. They laughed the quiet laugh of old 
memories. 

At the moment our friend had put the painter's 



In Pursuit of the Arts 147 

disgust down to the worker's characteristic intol- 
erance of the theorist. But now, after a long dive 
into the luke-warm seas of this literature, he wrung 
his own hands in the Bohemian pantomime. It was 
of a piece, for the most part, with a mass of stuff 
about literature — ''Dante's Vision," "Wordsworth's 
Nature," "Browning's Philosophy" — for those who 
wanted to shine among the ignorant without the 
intolerable trouble and boredom of reading the 
original. And if he had found the literary pabulum 
thin and sickly, tricked up with sentiment and 
mystic emotion, he found the artistic pabulum yet 
worse, with the greater license of the vaguer sub- 
ject. He had independently a vigorous sense of 
meaning for the words spirit and soul or he would 
have retreated from this literature with a hardened 
loathing for both. As it was, the words insight and 
message were forever spoiled for him. 

His criticism of this literature, apart from his 
personal disgust, was that it wrought itself up en- 
tirely within the circle of its own substance — that 
it failed to anchor itself in the charted waters of the 
general consciousness and went drifting off into 
the chimerical seas of its own romantic dreams. 
Well, that was just what he hated. 

Among his friends was one whom he liked with 
unreasoning affection, ignoring differences which in 
anyone else would have been irritating and repellent. 
With youth, and a dark, handsome Spanish face, a 
serious but not humorless concern for the gentler 
matters of life, and a gift of expression that had 
tempted him into poetry with justifying results, this 
friend surprised those who knew his type and per- 



148 A Lover of the Chair 

ceived his vogue with a modesty that sometimes 
almost became humihty. The most diverse ac- 
knowledged his charm. He was philosophical, 
aesthetic, epicurean, humanitarian, classic, satiric, 
romantic, stoic, by turns and in combination, re- 
flecting the bent of his companions and his mood. 
He had a quick sympathy that could be roused by 
any appeal to his feelings, and an intensity of re- 
sponse, an ardor of approval, a self-effacement be- 
fore the conquering idea, that led to the general 
agreement that the crowning quality of his charm 
was sincerity. 

Our friend at first demurred at this verdict. In 
the end, however, he agreed. But he agreed with a 
discrimination that helped him later to probe to the 
human roots of his own philosophical leanings 
in this moot region of the feelings and the senses. 
Here was a t5^e of sincerity that based itself on the 
emotions, and expressed itself in the kindling eye 
and fervid tones that in personal intercourse are the 
touchstones of genuineness. It differed, as the 
weathercock differed from the compass, from that 
other, uncompromising sincerity that offends all the 
world by sticking with stubborn conviction to one 
point. It arose out of a character that was at any 
moment all of one piece, one whose intellect never 
contradicted the feelings, whose lyric vein was so 
dominant that the reason was but the ready con- 
jurer of expressions to clothe the emotions. It was 
a genuine sincerity, but it was the sincerity of the 
weather. It had no inner antagonism to cast doubts 
on its own consistency. It took life altogether 
passionally; its test of truth was the immediate 



In Pursuit of the Arts 149 

thump of the heart. Memory and reason, if they 
should have contradicted the passing emotion, would 
have been discredited as the creatures of an ex- 
perience that was dead — valueless conservatives 
clinging with pathetic loyalty to the outworn con- 
ditions among which they had been born. 

He saw, therefore, in this friend of his, a type — 
heightened indeed beyond the normal run of men, 
but so much the more the type — of the modern 
man who had substituted the immediate for the 
remote, the aesthetic appeal for the moral principle, 
and who gave to art its conquering modern vogue — 
the man who had suppressed his inner duality. He 
saw in this suppression the elements of modernism — 
sincerity, enthusiasm, sympathy, a carelessness of 
the past, a rejection of tradition and authority, a 
ready response to the feelings, and an unlimited flow 
of reasons to justify the current emotion. And he 
saw in the aestheticism of his time a symptom of 
the malady of which he conceived culture to be sick. 

Just now he was interested in art — our dualistic 
friend — and in his eternal pursuit he began pretty 
near the bottom. He began with the senses. The 
window at which he sat looked out on a quad 
hemmed in by Gothic buildings whose low eaves 
stemmed the tide of ivy that flowed up the many- 
windowed walls. Some gardener of old had set elms 
within the corners, and below his window a cherry 
tree had sprung up from a pit dropped in the grass 
by some unrecorded lounger. As he sat now, looking 
out on the scene of which he never tired, two 
students, leisurely exceptions to the busy norm, lay 
in the shade of the early leaves and their lazy voices 



150 A Lover of the Chair 

came up to his open window. The moment won a 
Hvely response from him. He felt its perfection. 

The point of his present distinction, however — 
he was always making distinctions — was that this 
was not all that there was to be said about it. There 
was something else in him beside and behind the 
sense of its external beauty, even behind his grati- 
fication at the sense of this beauty — something to 
which it reported. It was something that perceived, 
was gratified, and could be critically interested and 
amused by the process of automatic gratification. 
He knew that this pursuit might be endless without 
taking him very far, for he might always find an 
awareness in his mind that would envelop suc- 
cessively each preceding awareness, like those classes 
of classes of a certain modern school of mathematical 
logicians. But he saw that there was something 
gained by this process of going at least one step 
behind the simple, grateful sensations. He had a 
more masterly control over the allurements of them. 

There were enough people around him who 
stopped at the first stage. With most of them, in- 
deed, he had a hearty sympathy — frank, genial 
beings, the bulk and sinew of humanity, who ate 
and drank and golfed without pretense and without 
curiosity. He liked them. They made up the 
spectacle of life, the pathos and romance of its 
comedy. They were in both senses the hosts of the 
world, among whom the thoughtful were but the 
rare and suffered guests. The worst that he had 
against them was that in their idleness and leisure 
and unreflecting pleasantness they gave acclaim to 
a class of practitioners whose pretense was to be of 



In Pursuit of the Arts 151 

the reflective part of mankind, but who were in 
reaHty Hke themselves — merely sensational. He 
was thinking of the art-mongers. Against the art- 
mongers he had on principle a vigorous grudge. 

Grudge was indeed a vigorous word, as he smiled 
to realize, feeling his own great love of the senses. 
His whole past was a web of brightly colored visions; 
he acknowledged his captivity to the marbles of 
Praxiteles, to the canvases of Leonardo; music 
haunted his reflective moments. In one sense he 
had a reputation for sensuousness that made him in 
some quarters disliked and mistrusted. He in- 
dulged his minor vices. Asceticism seemed to him 
a pretty poor virtue — a feeder of pride, a breeder 
of intolerance. He Hked to find in others the hu- 
manizing touch of moderate indulgence, the com- 
munity of the weed, the gemuthlichkeit of friendly 
beer, the sociability of wine. There seemed to him 
something weak in a too fearful avoidance of tempta- 
tion, in the too sedulous care for the flesh. There 
it was, the flesh, gross perhaps, asking for beef and 
brew, but the ironic condition of there being a spirit. 
And he had not seen that his countrymen in denying 
it certain indulgence had made a nation notable fof 
their spiritual attainment. 

There seemed, indeed, a kind of frank safety in 
answering its demands by a mild and temperate 
dipping into the admitted vices. Their frank labels 
marked so well and so openly the dangers that 
hedged them in. The real peril lay in the subtle 
disguises by which a more recondite sensuousness 
passed itself off as something nobler. And herein 
lay his case against the arts. By calling themselves 



152 A Lover of the Chair 

something else they evaded the bounds of temper- 
ance, and by adroit labeHng they secured the frank 
of those virtues that need no curb in a sensuous 
world. 

He doubted, tentatively, whether the arts were 
altogether something else. He allied them offen- 
sively with the pleasures of the senses, exasperating 
humorless devotees, and making for himself the re- 
pute that he was not sensitive to the subtle appeals 
to the spirit. This charge was so easy to put upon 
him, and had illustrations of sensualists who did see 
nothing in art so pat to its hand, and won partisans 
so readily, that in most quarters denial was useless. 
None the less he uttered his heterodoxy for the 
sake of amusing experiences that invariably 
followed. 

When put to it the devotees had little to say for 
the spirituality of art — little to say that they could 
say. What it did for them was, it seemed, some- 
thing that they could not say. It did something 
unutterable. In the face of his amused smile it was 
exasperating for them to have nothing more in its 
defense than that they liked it, enjoying the sen- 
sations and emotions that it induced. It was no 
less exasperating to them that he could say as much 
for himself. 

They did indeed maintain that there was some- 
thing else behind — something spiritual, something 
indefinable because to the perception of it there was 
no other medium than the particular piece of art 
that had produced it — that each specimen of art 
conveyed a unique spiritual experience. In the safe 
elevation of such vagueness they were unassailable. 



In Pursuit of the Arts 153 

When in his vulgarity he suggested that mutton 
also conveyed a sensation that was unique and un- 
utterable he did nothing but convince them of his 
grossness. To say that wine, too, elevated the 
spirit to conceptions that had no other means of 
access, and that all their claims for art applied ex- 
actly to his claims for sensuousness, was, they said, 
to take advantage of a duplicity of language, a pun, 
a poverty of the verbal. medium. When he objected 
that language was at least infinitely less vague in 
the expression of ideas than any other medium, he 
was confronted by the assertion that the highest 
reach of language lay in its suggestiveness rather 
than in its simple and exact expression. He was 
referred to a thousand lyrics. The implication in 
this reasoning was that as language approached the 
arts in the vagueness of its signification it served to 
confirm the arts in their claim for significance. 

They pointed out men — Walter Pater, for ex- 
ample — who had shown what definite ideas art 
could stimulate. There was his notable passage on 
the Mona Lisa. It was but a further exasperation 
to suggest that this definiteness — whatever these 
writings possessed — was the definiteness of lan- 
guage and required language for their expression — 
that Pater was a man of letters expressing in letters 
his own thoughts. 

The worst was that he himself laid claim to par- 
ticipation in all that art had to offer. There was 
no mode of refuting him but by derision. It was 
clear enough that the inexpressible may have lain 
in him as well as in them. He had indeed sedu- 
lously visited the galleries of Europe, had spent 



154 A Lover of the Chair 

long days in Paris studios, and long nights in 
friendly wranglings with artists and art critics; he 
had worn thin underwear and shabby clothes in 
forced expiation for the purchase of beautiful pic- 
tures and costly rugs. But these evidences only 
served to make him out a traitor in his thoughts to 
what he owed so much to in fact. 

He had long, indeed, given over such ill-natured 
bickerings. And on the whole the world is good 
humored and its memory is short. So it came about 
during this winter, with the sight of him in the gal- 
leries and the rumors of his pictures, that a naive 
group of women invited him to address them on the 
subject of modern painting. He was tempted to 
accept, but the good angel of his amenity prompted 
him to send them first an outline of his points, and 
they found some reason for postponing the occasion 
indefinitely. It never came off, but the informal 
prospectus got about somehow to a wider circle than 
the address would have reached, and caused some 
fuming among the local representatives of Culture. 

The matter was one of the kind that accumulates 
myths. The name of Art had not had a questioning 
breath breathed upon it in the local hearing, and the 
faintest whisper no doubt sounded like blasphemy. 
It certainly grew to blasphemy in rumorous repe- 
tition. Our friend was too well used to such mis- 
representations to wonder at them, but in the more 
charitable mood of his middle years he felt less 
arrogant and more willing to explain — perhaps a 
little more anxious for sympathy. At all events he 
took the occasion of a local exhibit to send to a 
morning paper a criticism that might serve to ex- 



In Pursuit of the Arts 155 

plain the points he had made in the misunderstood 
and maltreated outline. 

His hatred was of sham and of the wind-blown 
mists that had come to be the atmosphere in which 
art was breathing, and he hit harder than he quite 
realized. He counted on the amenity of common 
sense to dulcify his blows, and forgot, in the interest 
of making his ideas tell, that art had got Hfted out 
of the reach of common sense. 

There was a tempest. It took him by amaze, for 
his points had seemed to him obvious, but more 
because he would not have believed that the par- 
ticular enemies he had aroused had the moral 
strength to be robustly angry. They were; and for 
a time life scintillated around him with stirring 
flashes of romance. He would have said that none 
now cared enough about matters of art and intellect 
to lose sleep over their battles, but he found that 
they did — two, at least. 

For one March dusk, a week later, he discovered 
a pair of shadows following him, and near a de- 
serted corner he was set upon with honest fists that 
had little token of decay. The pair were gallant 
enough to halt him and issue their challenge before 
they set to, and if they were two to his one they 
may have reckoned on his stout cane. He had the 
wall of them; and a good stick and a good arm are 
better than two men. He felt their fists before he 
felt the thrilling tingle of a blow of his own and 
saw one of them stagger. The other gave over and 
went to the aid of his companion, and half running 
dragged him away. 

Our friend shook his arm. The feel of his blow 



156 A Lover of the Chair 

was in it, and the crushing fall of the stick, and it 
sickened him. He had a sudden sympathy for his 
assailants and for their anger and their attack. 
From their voices they were young and their wrath 
had been stirred over a principle and had kept hot 
for a week. All these things appealed to him. 
There were high spirits and high blood there. 
Neither then nor afterwards could he think of the 
attack as cowardly. He had the advantage to his 
generosity, as he smiled to reflect, of being the victor. 

He said nothing of the affair, and never heard of 
it or of his assailants from outside. But he noticed, 
in writing again on the same subject, a more sym- 
pathetic note in his style. The personal contact, 
and the knowledge that what he had said had 
reached home somewhere — rare enough in his ex- 
perience — touched him with a more intimate sense 
of the human aspect of his ideas. Years before, he 
would have called the change sentimental — the ul- 
timate damnation of his youthful vocabulary. But 
he could smile now and indulge the gentler mood, 
knowing that a good deal of such softening might 
leave him still free from the repute of sentimentality. 

His ideas did not change. He still hated the 
crude, dehumanized intellectualism that science was 
foisting on humane affairs, and he still hated the de- 
intellectualized emotionalism that had run mad in 
the arts. He had a vision of harmony — of 
judgments and motives born of a nice balance of 
all the faculties. What he saw about him was each 
faculty snatching up some part of life and running 
off with it to its own natural extreme. 

"You forget," one of his friends remarked, "that 
this is the age of the specialist." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 157 

"Ah," he returned, "that is just what I can't 
forget — the age of one-sided judgments. You re- 
member the Pretorian Guards. For a reasonable 
life weVe got, don't you see, to keep the military 
subordinate to the civil power — to keep the 
specialist subordinate to the judgment that co- 
ordinates." 

"You belong, then, to those modern philosophers 
who deny the difference of the faculties?" 

Our friend smiled. 

"So far from it!" he exclaimed. "For they too 
are tarred with the same stick. They see the 
reasoners running off to one extreme and they rush 
off to another. But if what they believed were so 
they would have no case against the reasoners or 
any others, for the reasoners would simply be using 
their one faculty, according to the formula. No, 
the thing is to distinguish clearly in order to pro- 
portion and harmonize — to be intellectual in order 
to be able to judge and restrain the emotions, and 
to have feelings that illuminate the intelligence — 
that is the balance I dream of." 

"And what has that to do with the arts?" 

"Ah, everything in the world," he returned. 



158 A Lover of the Chair 



II 

SENSE AND THE SOUL 

"You intrigue me, you artists/' he said to his 
friend the poet, one late afternoon as they 
sat before the window, smoking as was their wont, 
and looking out on the spring that was invading the 
quad. 

It was a grateful hour — the time of day when 
bodily energy has worn itself into fidgetless repose, 
and the mind, through with its pedestrian business, 
tries its wings; when silences are eloquent of peace, 
and filled with the moving mystery of deepening 
colors in earth and sky, and talk may touch itself 
with poetry and yet be but the nice prose of the 
moment. It was the time of year when memories 
go backward and with light touch cull out magic 
moments of childhood's wonder and content, or re- 
flect upon old sorrows the mellowing beneficence of 
time. 

It was at such hours and such seasons that the 
poet had come into the way of dropping in to spend 
the dusk in silence or in talk, or in both, as the 
moment went. To-day it was talk, perforce, for his 
host had not yet shaken off the world. The stains 
of his afternoon journey were still on his mind, and 
he was still brushing them off while his guest was 
composing himself in the window. 

''I dare say," smiled his friend. "And these 
things have a way of being reciprocal. But what 
have we done now?" 

"Nothing new. What you have always done — 



In Pursuit of the Arts 159 

taken a simple sensation and clothed it in awesome 
terms." 

He reached to the table by his side and drew out 
a handsome volume from under a pile of handsome 
volumes. 

"Here is a sample," he went on, turning to a 
marked passage. "Listen to its mystic phrases: 
'Nothing but the rare strains of great music can 
reach the spiritual height of this half-seen, somber 
landscape.' Now in sober truth do you think that 
a picture can be spiritual, or the rare strains of 
great music? For my own part I think them very 
pleasant sensations. They seem to me to differ 
physically, but not philosophically, from the smell 
of orange blossoms or the taste of mutton." 

The poet sat back in his chair, his eyes brooding 
on the lacy edge of the elm tree outlined against the 
sky. 

"Gross!" he murmured at last, "oh, gross! Give 
and take, my friend, is the legend over the door of 
your mind. That is why some of us like to come 
here better than elsewhere. But gross!" 

"None the less my question is fair," pursued his 
host. "I don't say that the taste of mutton stirs as 
pleasant reactions in me as the smell of orange 
blossoms, or that these in turn thrill me as Wagner's 
Waldweben never fails to do. I admit the grossness 
of mutton, but I should say that the matter is simply 
a gradation within the same field — sensations that 
we like or dislike in varying degrees." 

"There you are," cried the poet. "You go grub- 
bing like a mole in the cellarage. But you will 
never find it there, your answer. You must come 



i6o A Lover of the Chair 

out into the sunlight. Don't you see that all your 
intellectual distinctions are underground burrowings, 
and that you won't find this natural thing, the 
spirit, in your darkened, artificial rooms." 

''Your music, then, and your landscapes, and your 
lyrics — " 

''Ah, of course they are artificial too. But don't 
you see where they lead you? Your thoughts, your 
reason, your logic, are all matters of symbols — 
symbols too of your own invention — a clever net- 
work between arbitrary fixed points. But your arts 
go direct to something else, to something native and 
spontaneous in you. There are gross pictures, and 
gross music, and gross verse. But there is a kind 
of music, and of pictures, and of verse that, as you 
say, are high in the scale of our liking. But the 
difference is more than that we like the one and not 
the other. For somewhere in the scale there is a 
subtle line beyond which there enters, in some 
degree, the element of beauty. And beauty is a 
perception of the soul." 

"Why soul?" 

"For no reason, I am afraid, that the reason can 
see. But in our intuitions we know that it exists, 
and we know it in the measure of our feelings, not 
in the measure of our logic. Do we have souls? 
With reason alone we should never have thought of 
such things. The perception is one of the emotions, 
and so I think we have a right to say soul. Your 
lover in mid-ecstasy is surer of a soul than your 
bank clerk in mid-career down a column of figures. 
And your poet striding the moor with the blast in 
his face is surer of it than when he is seated at his 



In Pursuit of the Arts i6i 

typewriter making the last fair copy of his verse. 
And this perception of beauty is the soul in one of 
its essential exercises. What I fear for you, sir, 
whom I love beyond any of your kind, is that though 
you like certain sights and like certain sounds, you 
have none of that sense of beauty whose whisper- 
ings make you know that you have a soul." 

^'A soul," his host mused. ''Yes, here we may 
talk freely. I like to go back to old out-fashioned 
discussions. And the soul is out-fashioned if any- 
thing is. Besides it is one of your characteristic 
words. It is a point I should like to clear up. I am 
really in earnest. So you must remember my un- 
derlying sympathy if I push you a little hard. For 
it seems to me that you and your kind stand at the 
very center of one of our modern weaknesses." 

''I am fortified." 

"Well, in this sense of beauty, and in the emotions 
that go with it and make you aware of the soul, tell 
me, is it just that thrill of feeling and nothing more 
that makes you call it soul?" 

"How do you mean?" 

"I mean that when you have an intuition of the 
soul, either you have simply the emotions that ac- 
company beauty, and you call that emotion soul, 
or that emotion makes you aware of something else 
and you call that something else soul. And I want 
to know which you mean." 

"Why, then, that something else." 

"Ah, then what is that something else?" 

The poet paused for a moment, and a slow, 
pleasant smile lighted his eyes. 

"I know my answer won't satisfy you," he an- 



1 62 A Lover of the Chair 

swered, "for there you sit looking for it without, 
with cold eyes. And its very quality as soul makes 
it invisible from without. But I take your challenge. 
I should say then, that it is an intuitive consciousness 
of something within that responds to what we have 
called beauty." 

"To beauty alone?" 

"No, to beauty among other things." 

"But you don't budge from the spot. If I should 
speak of an intuitive consciousness of something 
within me that responds to this wine, I suspect that 
you would refuse to call that something soul. But 
the descriptions are the same. And so I must ask 
you again for the distinguishing quality that makes 
the one soul if the other is not." 

"If I speak," the poet returned, "I must speak of 
an intuition. An intuition is just what you will not 
allow." 

"No," our friend protested, "my grossness does 
not go so far as that. I know that all the cunning 
in the world could not put into words the subtle 
aroma of a violet. But I know that it exists. That 
is a sensation, you say. But just there is my 
trouble. I cannot distinguish between what you 
have called intuition and the senses themselves." 

"But the one is above the earth; the others are 
of it. The one lifts you out of yourself; the other 
is the response of the flesh itself." 

"But why? You are skeptical, but there are 
odors that catch me, lift me out of myself, out of 
the world, and bring to me lucid, magical moments. 
And in such moments I feel the vivid conviction of 
a freedom from the grossness of material Hfe." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 163 

"Ah, then you too feel an intuition, and feel the 
presence of the soul." 

"I wonder. And there are sounds in nature and 
in music, and sights in life and in art, that carry the 
same conviction." 

"Then why not soul?" 

"My difficulty is still that all this seems to me 
merely a way of speaking of the senses and our re- 
actions to them. But sense and soul, even in the 
vernacular, stand in opposition. 

"I see what you mean," said the poet. "Not that 
soul may not be grasped intuitively, but that if it is 
anything to speak of, if it has anything to it but a 
ravishing vacuum, it must have something to say 
for itself by which it can be distinguished from the 
primary intuitions of sense. And it must prove its 
distinctive worth. That is a fair enough demand." 

"Can it be met?" 

They sat before the window for some minutes 
before the poet resumed. 

"If I am to imagine a world without beauty," he 
began slowly at last, "to imagine myself with all 
my moments conscious only of gutters, and slums, 
and Calvinism, steel bridges, trousers, pot houses, 
coal mines, anthropology, legislatures, divorce 
courts, fashion, slang — it would be to imagine my- 
self without the subtle sense within me that I am 
worth more than the dust. But I have had other 
moments. I have seen the sunrise. Once I saw an 
English lark in the sky. I have seen fair faces, 
quiet manners, silks clinging to graceful forms, 
crocuses in March snows, the quad of Oriel, the 
Venus de Milo. I've listened to Bizet and Schubert, 



1 64 A Lover of the Chair 

heard the wind in the pines on the edge of Pacific 
slopes. I have read Keats and Euripides. And it 
is in such moments that I know that these and not 
those are the things to strive for. I know what 
direction in these matters Hfe should take. I know 
which soars toward heaven and which sinks to hell. 
I don't know why I know it, but that I do know it, 
that it gives an impulse that lifts the whole of life 
into a thing above the scum, and that it vitalizes and 
enhalos certain aims — of this I am certain. And 
so I say soul." 

They sat another few moments in silence. 

"I am disarmed," said his host, picking up the 
discourse. "I confess that when you began a little 
while ago to use the word I imagined dire things of 
you. I supposed that you had in mind something 
that you couldn't describe. I know that life has its 
underlying mysteries — that the simplest thing — 
the smell of the sod that comes into the window 
here and makes us both thrill with the sense of 
spring — can only be accepted and not explained. 
Why I like it I don't know. It is one of the primary 
mysteries. 

"What I was arming myself against was a new 
and gratuitous set of mysteries. Your friends of the 
artistic shop go beyond the pale, and when they 
say soul, many of them, they seem to intend some- 
thing merely mysterious. It is often open to doubt 
whether they themselves know what they mean. 
But here at last you have used the term intelligently 
enough. You have averred that beauty is a 
faculty of the soul and that the soul is the seat of 
those spontaneous preferences by which we dis- 



In Pursuit of the Arts 165 

tinguish higher and lower, better and worse. You 
have put meaning into the terms. We are on solid 
ground. We know definitely where we are." 

"Definitely?" The poet had a touch of mockery 
in his smile. 

''Ah, you grow literal. No, not definitely, but 
sufficiently for the purpose." 

They looked at the last orange band of day in 
the west. A white star was set in the green iris 
above it, and the first quarter of the moon hung 
overhead. 

'TVe been wondering what the purpose was," 
the poet said at last. "Sometimes I've been unkind 
enough to think that what you have wanted is to 
bring beauty — " he waved a hand toward the 
sky — " down to the narrow confines and dull terms 
of earth." 

"I have. I have." 

"Heaven help you!" 

"For I would make life beautiful." 

"By cribbing and confining it to paltry terms of 
reason?" 

"To terms that make it significant. For don't 
you see, say what we will, we can never alter the 
eternal fact of beauty. The intuition of it stays 
the same whatever the phrases we use. But the 
discussion of it belongs to the workaday world. 
And so it is important, when we do discuss it, and 
not simply experience it, to use terms that make it 
commensurate with the world we are discussing it 
in. Why, else, discuss it? And after all we are 
concerned with art. If we talked of beauty it was 
only incidentally. Beauty exists. But art is a 



1 66 A Lover of the Chair 

practice, and belongs to the part of living that we 
control. We have it or not, or in such and such a 
proportion, as we will. And it is to that end that 
it is worth stopping for a moment in the contem- 
plation or creation of beauty to discuss it — to find 
its nice place and proportion in the workaday process 
of living.'^ 

''And yet," said the poet, ''I don't like your dull- 
ing intrusion of the reason." 

The last light of the sun was gone, and the quad 
below was frosted with the moon. 

"It was you who clarified the point," his host 
smiled. 

"Ah, evil communications — " 



In Pursuit of the Arts 167 

ni 

ART AND THE REASONERS 

It was not until a day late in the spring that 
they caught up again the thread of the arts. 
The evening before, wild with a boisterous north 
wind and a purple drift of clouds, had promised a 
fine morrow. The poet had proposed an early start 
and a visit to the dunes by the lake, to put the 
season's best day to a good use. His friend had 
demurred for a moment. He had not hunted out 
Nature for many years, and he misdoubted the wel- 
come she would extend to him. He had consented 
at last, however, and next morning the two men 
made the journey. 

If they talked on the way, youthfully, forgetful 
of the years, as men will at the first setting out on 
a day's jaunt, they had little enough to say from the 
moment they touched the loose sands, at first from 
the soft footing that used their breath, and after- 
wards, when they had made the swale between two 
hummocks that had hid the lake, from the presence 
of what they had come for. For they were young 
enough still to feel for a time the spell of the place — 
the tumult of the lake, the endless stretch of flat 
beach, the dunes, piled and scooped and hollowed — 
a world of blue and white, and of yellow sands, with 
here and there the green of streaming grasses, 
dwarfed oaks straining landward, and vivid lupin 
with its blue flower reflecting the sky. They were 
taken possession of by the roaring waters and the 
battering wind, and by the sting of sand, and the 
glinting sunlight. 



1 68 A Lover ,of the Chair 

They wandered about among the fantastic archi- 
tecture of the dunes, or sat in sheltered hollows 
where the sand sifted down on them and filled the 
wrinkles of their clothes. They were silent, a lift 
of the hand saying all there was to say. The poet, 
however, after the first half hour, was restless; 
something, the wind, the roar of the waves, some 
inner wish unsatisfied, kept him ill at ease. Once 
he started up with a growl, when a trim-bearded 
man with a tin canister slung from his shoulder 
came into their vista. The invader was walking 
slowly, with eyes riveted to the sand at his feet, and 
apparently lecturing to two boys, who followed 
listening, their own eyes on the sand. 

To our friend there was something pleasant in 
the sight of these three naturalists, so blind to the 
large impression of the scene, so ardent in their 
attention to particular details. With his love for 
the spectacle of life, and the sense of its mingling of 
many interests and many activities, there had come 
now and again in the course of the morning a whisper 
of emptiness in their own attempt to escape from it. 
He responded sensitively, indeed, to the thrill of 
sight and sound, and for moments together he could 
forget that life held anything beyond, or need hold 
anything beyond. But a vague discomfort, some- 
thing more than the sadness of beauty, hung like a 
haze in the atmosphere of his mind. And now it 
became dimly articulate. He pictured the three 
naturalists home again, tired, with faces burning, 
garrulous about the day's finds and silent about its 
beauties; but with the consciousness of that back- 
ground of boisterous air and vivid color and sweep- 



In Pursuit of the Arts 169 

ing lines forever endearing the memory of their pre- 
occupation. By contrast their own search for the 
pure thrill, detached from a justifying substance, 
seemed weak and futile. 

By a tacit consent, while the afternoon was still 
young, they turned back to the city. Once or twice 
on the journey the poet roused himself as though to 
speak, and then sank back in silence. When they 
alighted he insisted on taking the other home. He 
was eager; he had unfinished things to say. 

His friend was interested, amused. The poet too, 
then, had found the thrill insufficient. A little sadly 
he recognized that their time of pure illusion had 
passed. Nature had lost its personal immediacy; 
its sympathy was gone, and the communion that 
was once the solace of such wanderings no longer 
held its old rapport. They were humanized. The 
significance of their day in the open, if it was to 
have a significance, had now to come from them- 
selves, to be wrought out, to be rationalized. 

When they had settled themselves in the poet's 
snug study, and had broached a bottle of the Ma- 
deira for which among his friends he was as re- 
nowned as for his verse, the restlessness of the day 
found its relaxation. It took form, on the part 
of the poet, in a hearty objurgation of the trio of 
naturalists. Our friend was amused and silent, see- 
ing in this outburst the poet's rebellion against the 
manifestations he had felt in himself. 

"I am weary of the reason," he said, "and the life 
of reason. Look at it around us here. Everything 
is a matter of calculation. Sometimes I would have 
the old life of duels and drink, roistering and prison 



1 7© A Lover of the Chair 

for debt again. It was human at least. Things 
are in the saddle. And about things there's nothing 
but calculation. There used to be young men moon- 
ing about with sonnets in their brains. Well, they 
were better than young men keen about the stock 
market. Freedom and justice used to make young 
orators glow; and now it's all statistics and eco- 
nomics. There used to be fierce partisans of Achilles, 
and Hector, Ulysses, Themistocles, Coeur de Leon, 
Cromwell, and now there is nothing but a set of 
clerks grovelling among dusty documents. And 
where of old we used to have young men who would 
weep over the Apology, now we have these striplings 
following that parched worm-monger, brainbound, 
grubbing there in the midst of beauty, as insensible 
to it as the snails that the sandpipers turn and wheel 
and turn again to find at the ebb of the waves. I 
want to see the old generous days again when life 
was human!" 

Our friend was moved. He too, in his own way, 
had mourned the mechanical cast that economics, 
efficiency, and the scientific method were giving to 
those aspects of the intellectual life that could flower 
best untouched by that baleful trio. But he knew 
that the poet, from his own point of view, like the 
Bergsonian who years ago had warned him against 
the reason, was not free himself from the need to 
reason and seem reasonable. He detected an in- 
teresting distinction that might be worth pursuit. 
The poet's note of rebellion was commonplace 
among the romantic and artistic sects. It had oc- 
curred to him not infrequently that their aversion 
to the reason was often evident, not only in their 



In Pursuit of the Arts 171 

words, but also in the quahty of their ideas, and 
that art itself was suffering grievously from their 
malady. 

"Once upon a time," he said, "you will remember, 
we talked about beauty and the soul. I sha'n't soon 
forget it; you did something that is hard to for- 
give — you convinced me against my will. I dare 
say that it wasn't altogether wasted for you, for you 
gave us both a clearer sense of a very delicate point. 
Well, that was what I should call reasoning. You 
will remember that your conclusion was that the 
soul was the center of our intuitive aspirations." 

"Spontaneous ones, not reasoned." 

"Yes, spontaneous. But there lies the point. You 
were not satisfied to have your intuitions. You 
wanted me to understand and agree with you — take 
the same attitude to beauty that you took. And 
there you were. You reasoned. There was nothing 
else for it. You are sociable; you like your friends, 
and want to share your sense of the world with them. 
That is one use of the reason, and I imagine that 
you for one would never be willing to give it up. 
You are even a poet. But there's another use. The 
soul, you say, is the center of spontaneous, intuitive 
preferences — beauty, courage, wisdom, honor, 
justice, religion, and all the other high aspirations 
that make us head in one direction and not in an- 
other. And living is an affair calculated at its best 
to carry out these aspirations." 

"Yes." 

"And these aspirations are spontaneous, not 
reasoned." 

"Yes." 



172 A Lover of the Chair 

"Then there Hes the second use. Which aspira- 
tions shall we follow, and in what proportions? For 
they spring up of themselves, and sometimes at in- 
opportune moments; and often they conflict. Shall 
I buy a certain Tudor sideboard that I long for with 
my love of beauty, or the Plutarch that I long for 
with my love of wisdom, or pay off the family debt, 
that I groan under with my sense of duty, or help 
poor Oakly the bankrupt, in the next street, that I 
feel sorry for with my sympathy? The color of 
life, personal and social, depends, doesn't it, upon 
such judgments, and upon the proportions that our 
responses take in following them?" 

"Perhaps. Go on." 

"You don't love the spectacle of monasticism, all 
religion and little beauty, with its evasion of the full 
moral struggle of social life. But that monasticism 
represents one set of proportions, and is dictated by 
an intuition that has high claims upon the soul. I 
mean religion. And you don't care for the spectacle 
of Calvinism, all morals and religion but no beauty. 
But there's another set of proportions. Benvenuto 
Cellini is a more pleasing spectacle perhaps, but I 
doubt whether you would care for a life built on his 
proportions. Even he had his religion and his fine 
courage, as well as his sense of beauty. Baudelaire, 
Paul Verlaine, George Moore nauseate you; you 
don't care for their proportions." 

"And you — you would throw us to the mercy of 
the three grub-hunters who passed us to-day, crawl- 
ing through paradise with their noses in the sand?" 

"Hardly. And yet they stand for something. 
They have a sense of reason, and if they would only 



In Pursuit of the Arts 173 

stick to science, as they so roiled you by doing to- 
day, I should have no objection to them." 

"You do chafe at them, then?" 

"And respect them too. For I can't help seeing 
that the reason is the authority for us all." 

"Again!" 

"With a distinction. It's just the distinction that 
you seem not to make — between the scientific 
reason and the moral reason. We've allowed the 
scientists to get us all adrift in the matter. They 
haven't made the distinction either. But their 
reason is not my reason nor yours. We are con- 
cerned with the moral reason. It's the moral reason 
that is the final authority. Is that a bold statement? 
I dare say that some day they will come to ac- 
knowledge its truth." 

"I don't know just where you are taking me," the 
poet smiled, "but you've turned down a pleasant 
lane, and I'll go with you for a way. It's not much 
worn, this lane." 

"I know. The whole current of traffic just now 
is over the scientific road. The opinion that is go- 
ing about is that science is the final authority in all 
things. Well, it isn't." 

His host sat up with reviving interest. 

"I'm inclined to agree with you," he returned. 
"Still let me take up the cudgels. I can remember 
the thrill of the moment when the scientific vision 
came on me first — of hierarchies of laws governing 
the greatest motions and the subtlest reactions of the 
outstretching universe, from the stars down to the 
least quiver of conscious emotion. The conception 
is thrilling. I've rebelled and hid away the thought 



174 A Lover of the Chair 

in the dark cellars of my mind. But I can't forget 
it." 

"But that is not science." 

"How do you mean — not science?" 

"It's a vision; it's poetry." 

"But science?" 

"Something humbler, I should say — a body of 
human knowledge. After all, what more is it? 
They used to smile with scorn, half a century ago, 
at our naive old anthropocentric notions of life, and 
praise science for releasing us from such egotistic 
fancies. They strutted and swelled about a good 
deal, those old scientists, in their humility. They 
were proud of their discovery that humanity was 
only a cousin to the brutes, an accident of the great 
process, a mere worm. Well, they never got away, 
of course, from the anthropocentric attitude. Their 
pride was in their own very human accomplish- 
ment. I'm not at all sure but that they were more 
anthropocentric than the old theologues ; the latter at 
least conceived a God outside themselves. 

"The point is, isn't it, that to be sure we may be 
mere worms under the feet of universal law, and 
everything from the motions of the stars to the 
subtlest quiver of emotion may be determined by an 
inevitable mechanical necessity, but that science 
isn't universal law; it is only human knowledge, and 
can never be anything more than human knowledge. 

"The old scientists — what a race they were! — 
egotists of the sublimest kind ! I can't help, myself, 
admiring their colossal pride. It's the stuff of all 
great and spectacular heroism. What they tried to 
do — really thought they were doing — was to look 



In Pursuit of the Arts 175 

down on poor humanity from the point of view of 
the gods. Only, of course, Hke all other mortals, 
they couldn't. They had no more knowledge than 
human knowledge. How could they? And their 
pride was a very human pride in their human knowl- 
edge." 

''I see your point," the poet mused — "that being 
human we can't get above our own point of view. 
If we could, still it would be our own point of view, 
ad infinitum. The world is important for us be- 
cause we're here, and its values for us are inevitably 
its human values. But still if the scientists — I'm 
drawing from that vision that I hate — are, in their 
human way, attaining a knowledge of those uni- 
versal laws, why aren't they the final authorities in 
human affairs?" 

"You come to the subtle point," his friend re- 
turned. "I don't know that I have the skill to put 
it, but I should say something like this. All these 
things that we exercise moral judgment in — things 
that are involved in this matter of authority as we 
have used the word — all these things are outside 
the specific range of science. If there is something 
resembling universal law, then that law will go on 
operating no matter what we do. Disease is as much 
an expression of it as health, misery as much as 
happiness, anarchy as much as order. What does 
universal law care? If science were all in all we 
might let things drift. It would be as much pleased 
with blight as with blooming orchards. But don't 
you see, humanly we desire some operations of that 
law more than others — health instead of sickness, 
justice instead of injustice, comfort instead of dis- 
comfort. 



176 A Lover of the Chair 

"Being human we inject certain preferences into 
the pot. And I suspect that at bottom we value this 
body of human knowledge called science, and cul- 
tivate it so sedulously, because we believe that it can 
serve us in attaining these preferences. We set up, 
don't we, an idea of human character and an idea 
of social relations that we think admirable. And on 
the basis of those ideas we go in for science, or don't 
go in for it, or go in for it in a certain degree. What 
else is there, ultimately, to prompt us in the matter? 
Certainly not universal law. It goes on with or 
without our approval indifferently — as much 
pleased when a man dies of consumption as when 
he dies of old age. 

"Universal law goes on whether scientists are 
there to search into its secrets or not. But whether 
there shall be any science is a matter of moral 
judgment. Shall a man be a barber, or a lawyer or 
a scientist? Not science but moral judgment de- 
termines. Shall an institution cultivate science; 
shall a community have such a thing; shall there be 
such a thing; what direction shall it take; what use 
shall it be put to, or not be put to? All of these 
things are matters of moral judgment." 

"Yet science gives you authentic guidance." 

"Information rather, isn't it? Just as the 
plumber gives you information about pipes but 
doesn't help you as to whether to tap the mains 
surreptitiously." 

"There is a distinction." 

"And so I say that in the large it is the moral and 
not the scientific authority that is final." 

"And the point of all this?" 



In Pursuit of the Arts 177 

^'Ah, was there a point?" 

^'I'm sure there was." 

"I remember. When you think of the reason and 
rebel against its hardness and coldness, and its me- 
chanical obtuseness to the humaner things that you 
care so much for, isn't it the scientific reason that 
you have in mind?" 

"I dare say. But what has this to do with beauty? 
There it is — a thing in itself. Little it recks for 
you and your moral reason." 

"Exactly. And little the universal laws care for 
us and our moral reason. But here we are. Life is 
a matter of living in the midst of all the things that 
are given — the donnes of existence — beauty 
among the rest. And there we are. The question is 
how to make out the kind of life we aspire to among 
all the conditions and pressures and demands that 
we find ourselves among willy nilly. If beauty were 
the only claimant the case would be simple, but it 
isn't, and for very few is it even the chief. Hence 
the question of proportion; and hence the need of 
reason." 

''That is all very reasonable," said the poet with 
a resigned smile, "and very dull. But contrast this 
morning with this last hour; which shall we both 
remember the longer, and with more pleasure?" 

"Contrast prose and verse, wages and wine," 
smiled his guest. "I grant the dullness, but it is 
you romanticists who have made it necessary to go 
back over the old ground. It was conquered ground 
once." 

"What will you make of it once you have retaken 
it?" 



178 A Lover of the Chair 

"Another long story, and equally dull. Besides 
there is a tawny sunset to light us to dinner. Come." 

''I dare say you care no more for the reason than 
I do," said the poet, reaching for his hat. 



In Pursuit of the Arts 179 

IV 

madame's taste 

They set out one afternoon afoot, with no 
other intention than to end up before a good 
dinner and bring to it a worthy appetite. They 
decided promptly upon an obscure Httle restaurant 
some half dozen miles away, of which they had been 
told, and where certain things were to be had. The 
way thither was by one of those long streets of our 
American cities that can acquire no atmosphere 
about their names because they cut mechanically 
through a score of atmospheres — streets which 
plunge ahead, looking neither to right nor to left, 
and pass from opulence to poverty without a pause, 
without a bow, and reveal but the more cruelly the 
ancient stratification that democracy has had no 
power to fuse. 

As they went they talked of other wanderings in 
other cities, and inevitably of London, where per- 
haps more than anywhere else the lover of streets 
may find the things he loves — the irregularity that 
gives to each stretch its own character, the jogs and 
turns, the alleys, the passages, the buildings infinite 
in their dingy ugliness but with the charm of some- 
thing human in their huddled adaptation to the 
ancient stresses of the maze; the surprise of un- 
expected gardens, of quiet churchyards, of market 
squares; the humanity that seems to have sprung 
from the stones, so adapted are the types; above all 
the names that bring to the bare present the enrich- 
ing association of past times, household words of 



i8o A Lover of the Chair 

the mind to which life is endeared by the sense of 
the long human struggle. 

By contrast the way they were going seemed bare 
and mechanic. They knew, indeed, that part of their 
loss, part of what they missed, was due to their in- 
digenous eyes, that custom had robbed them of the 
surprise that a traveler from other parts would 
have enriched the spectacle with, that what they 
saw revealed itself to them too plainly and left no 
room for surmise. But they knew too that some- 
thing was missing there — that in the bare economic 
struggle which alone seemed to express itself in the 
variation from block to block as they tramped on 
was not the stuff to accumulate, even in the passage 
of time, the particular things that had endeared the 
greater ugliness of the older Babylon. 

For a moment they questioned the justice of this 
accusation, it was so tainted with the dear plati- 
tudes with which a business community refreshes 
itself in its pauses for breath. How they hated 
those voices that were so little different, explicitly, 
from their own! And they recalled with sad mer- 
riment that interjection of Thackeray's — that 
''other quacks, plague take them" with which he 
put the ineffable last touch upon himself and upon 
the world of Vanity Fair. But they knew they 
were right. The getting of a living was important, 
as were other contributions levied by nature, but it 
was not the thing that stirred the loyalty that — 
each in his own way — they had for what was 
human. And as they passed along the endless suc- 
cession of house-fronts suggestive of so little but that 
eternal office of nature, more and more dingy as 



In Pursuit of the Arts i8i 

they went on but without variation in kind, they 
drew their conclusions in silence. 

From the region of fenced gardens they had come 
into the region of unfenced gardens, then into the 
region of narrow houses wall to wall, then into a 
shabby region where boarding houses and modistes, 
and bakeshops and midwives held forth on placards 
or brass plates, then on to miles of tenements with 
here and there weedy lots between that held flaunt- 
ing billboards begging the public to change its 
tradesmen; and at last were come to a region so 
ugly with blear-paned shops, and dingy beer saloons, 
and dark dens of poverty up the narrow stairs be- 
tween, that the poet groaned aloud. 

It was on the farther edge of this region that 
they were to find the little restaurant where certain 
things were to be had. The poet had had explicit 
directions from someone who had been there, but 
his memory, though vivid, was at fault. Knowing, 
however that they were in the neighborhood of it 
they began inquiring. No one seemed able to tell 
them where it was. It was getting on to dusk, a 
time when most prospects succumb to the charm of 
deepening colors and softening shadows, but to the 
ugliness around them it added only the horror of 
increasing gloom. Screaming children, drunken 
men, rowdy groups of loafers, shabby beshawled 
women swarmed the littered walks and gutters. The 
roar of the street cars and traffic mingled with the 
roar that came out of the open doors of the saloons 
in a ceaseless din. 

They put their heads into the front doors of 
steamy eating houses, their noses attacked by the 



1 82 A Lover of the Chair 

thousand smells of rank food and rank humanity, 
and their ears by the crash of dishes and the roar of 
voices. They retreated to the street to be jostled, 
to be ignored, to be brazenly solicited. Once they 
penetrated to the interior of a garish palace, red and 
gold, with colossal nudes looking down on the flashy 
sordidness of the gayety at the tables below them. 
Again they backed into the street. 

''Let us get away from here," the poet groaned 
again. 

"Nil humanum — " his friend smiled sadly. 

"You are right. Let us go on looking." 

They ranged along the squalid house- fronts weary 
and ashamed. At last with the aid of a child, whose 
hard face stared at them from under a ragged shawl, 
they were taken, with misgivings, into a gloomy 
basement under high street steps. It was a sinister, 
lowering spot. Their guide left them with a shriek, 
at the wealth in her hand or at the ruse she had 
played them, they could not tell. 

They were in a little hall, grim, bare, lighted by 
a single gas burner. A door opened half way down. 
An ancient waiter with black, short jacket and white 
apron stood bowing in the doorway, his black sleek 
hair shining under the gas flare. Reassured they 
went in to the inner room. 

They knew at once that they had arrived. Their 
first impression was of silence, and then of something 
more penetrating and more restful — a hard and 
clean simplicity. It was a low basement room set 
out with a dozen black tables and black kitchen 
chairs with flat backs and narrow waists. The walls 
were white. At the front was a high white- 



In Pursuit of the Arts 183 

curtained window. A red rose on the sill and a red 
rose on each table were the only touches of color. 

At the back of the room, on a little platform be- 
hind a comptoire sat Madame, large, shapeless, 
stolid, with a peasant's face, her black hair flat on 
her small head. Our friends took places not far 
from this throne, followed by the waiter with card 
and menu. He hung above them patiently, bent at 
the hips, in the half humble, half fatherly way of 
old French waiters who have attained wisdom from 
their vantage ground. He beamed when the poet 
spoke in his own tongue. 

When he was gone the two men sat in silence. 
They were the only guests as yet, and the place had 
uninterrupted leisure to sink into their consciousness. 
Its quiet, its unadornment, its bare honesty, had 
much to say to them that they could not retell at 
once. They felt together its rebuke. It was not 
pretty; it was not cunningly contrived. It was the 
expression of something simple and austere. They 
agreed that it was beautiful, and that Madame, with 
her impassive face that Millet might have painted, 
humanized it. 

No doubt, as they knew, it was partly the mem- 
ories of old inns in Normandy that charmed them, 
and partly too the refuge it had been to them, the 
sudden contrast, the unspeakable ugliness it had 
been an escape from. All that, however, had its 
point; the place had for their grateful sense but the 
more bravely maintained its ancient virtues amidst 
the squalor and sordidness of the neighborhood. 
And if now it had come to be known to a few, like 
themselves, from so different a world, it must have 



1 84 A Lover of the Chair 

had its years of sordid local struggle before such 
knowledge could get abroad. 

^'You have been here long, madame?" the poet 
asked. 

^'It has been many years, monsieur/' she an- 
swered, impassively. 

They would have liked to talk to her, to ask 
questions, to gain the tale of her childhood, of her 
migration, of her experience during those many 
years, but something that they both felt, the re- 
buke of their idle curiosity, held them back. Be- 
fore their dinner arrived the tables had begun to 
fill up, and their chance was gone. 

Only twice did the stolidity of Madame's face 
and attitude relax. Once the door by her side 
swung open and a nurse, herself scarcely more than 
a child, entered carrying a black-haired baby and 
set it upon the comptoire before her. The nurse 
withdrew without a word and left the two together. 
It was like a ceremony. In a little while a young 
woman, slender, and with a face solemnly happy, 
came in and took the baby away. Scarce a word 
passed between them. 

''They were born here, lived here, daughter and 
grandchild?" the poet asked of the waiter who stood 
beaming on the tableau. 

"Yes, monsieur," the waiter replied. 

''You are thriving now?" 

"Yes, monsieur, now." 

"There was a time, then — " 

The old waiter glanced down the room, and then 
turned again to the two guests at the table by the 
rail. 



In Pursuit of the Arts 185 

"I speak of what I have seen, messieurs," he be- 
gan. "What I speak of is past and gone, and we are 
as you see us. But there was a time — " 

He was called. Twice again he drew near to their 
table but both times he was drawn away before he 
could go on. 

"It is as well," said the poet. ''One can piece out 
the tale." 

''Still, I should like the particulars," his friend 
demurred. 

But the chance was gone. Reluctantly they left 
when the dinner was done. 

"Les messieurs have been well served?" Madame 
asked as they bowed good-night to her. 

The poet answered from his heart, and for a 
moment her face again softened. 

Our friends passed out of the dingy hall into the 
dingier street, where the night life had already 
begun — the shouting, the strains of music from the 
lighted saloons, the shrieks of children gathered 
about the doors, the shawled women gossiping in 
shrill groups, loafers leaning against dark walls, 
reeling figures mumbling to themselves, dirt, and 
decay, and darkness. 

It was the afternoon of the next day that they 
had it out, as our friend irreverently put it, about 
this experience, and incidentally about another prob- 
lem that still hung over their minds. They had 
come home from their dinner wearied by their 
walk on the hard pavements, and even more by the 
monotony and sordidness of much of their impres- 
sions — despite Madame's — but with the sense that 



1 86 A Lover of the Chair 

they had not got at the thing that to them was the 
thing of importance. They had not got at its 
significance. 

The poet was the first to break out once they 
were together again. He launched into invectives 
against what he called our modern division of hap- 
piness. It was apparently new to him. How he 
had lived his forty years and been oblivious to so 
much that lay just beyond his elbow he could not 
have said. The truth was he had seen it with his 
eyes, had read of it in the daily and monthly prints, 
but never before had had it brought home to him 
with the full force of its yesterday's attack upon 
his sensibilities. And he was still bewildered about 
it. 

"Poverty," he mused. "I was born in a poor 
family, but it was a dry poverty — scant meals, 
scant clothes, and a fierce pride. It was not like 
this — loose, relaxed, rotting. This is horrible." 

"What can we do?" our friend asked, sadly 
enough. It was his old problem; he had never 
found the idea that should thrust it aside. 

They sat in silence for a while. 

"If I were one of those we rubbed elbows with on 
the street last night," the poet broke out at last, 
"I should have my fling at the fine delicate structure 
I was groaning at the base of. I should have 
nothing to lose, and to-day I can't quite justify 
myself for playing safe where I am. It's as though 
I were sitting tight just because I do have something 
to lose." 

Our friend smiled, without amusement. He 
caught, in the crude terms of this outburst, the force 



In Pursuit of the Arts 187 

of its first attack before the sad complexity of the 
problem had come home. It was the point at which 
the new school of generous young radicals impo- 
tently stopped. 

''You've never felt so before?" he asked. 

"Not just in this way. And I can't believe that 
you are going to say that I'll grow hardened and 
sink back." 

"I dare say that you will. But that isn't just 
what I was going to say. I was going to wonder how 
you have escaped so long. For now, clearly, alas, 
you too have been caught." 

"I don't understand you," the poet puzzled. "It's 
as though you had suddenly turned up hard. I 
don't want you soft, you understand, but I don't 
want to quit until I see that you aren't quite cruel." 

"Ah, we shan't quit. It's just that that's impos- 
sible. The thing is how you have kept from be- 
ginning until now." 

"I've been, I suppose, in an ivory tower." 

"I dare say, for die shock you've just had is the 
thing that's been shaking us for a score of years. 
I don't quite know how to put it. It has a thousand 
aspects. The one that strikes me now is this. Every 
age has its own way of feeling the raw edge of life, 
and this is our way. It's a matter of reactions. 
When tyranny's the thing the poets climb down 
and are shocked and join the revolution. There's 
the Eighteenth Century in France. When it's 
hardened tradition and sophistication, when con- 
vention, title, and rank are in the saddle, it's neg- 
lected individuality and merit that cry out. 
There's the Eighteenth Century in England. And 



1 88 A Lover of the Chair 

now wealth's the thing, and poverty fills us with 
horror." 

"And you, because you can sit aloof and see it 
as one of an eternal series of revolts against evil, is 
it to seem to you, therefore, the less important? 
Is it the point of learning that it takes away faith 
and hope?" 

"I know that it must seem so — not to you; you 
are merely putting the case — but to those others 
who are so kindly eager to set it right sweepingly, 
in the large. In a sense they are right. It does 
make one a little harder hearted — not about the 
particular case, but about the general case." 

The poet knew, through many bitter complaints, 
that his friend was liberal in his charities both with 
time and money. The complaints came from char- 
acteristic sources, and were to the effect that he de- 
moralized, in his own degree, the current efforts to 
deal from above with the problem of poverty, pre- 
ferring to gratify a kindly conscience rather than 
to be a good citizen. 

"Is it a case for hard-heartedness at all?" the 
poet asked, hypothetically ; for knowing his friend, 
the question, as he saw, was personally absurd. 

"For cool-headedness," the other returned ab- 
ruptly, "which goes for the same thing with many 
of those we are talking about. The thing isn't so 
simple as they, in their immediate sympathies, are 
in the way of feeling. They go at poverty itself — 
as though that in itself were the evil! It is evil 
enough, heaven knows, but it's not the evil." 

"So I should have said, till we had our sight of it 
yesterday. Since then I haven't been so certain. 
It was horrible." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 189 

''Not that it wasn't horrible, but that poverty 
wasn't the cause," his friend added. 

''Why not? It breeds there, and the brood grows. 
What but poverty keeps them there?" 

They sat for a moment looking out of the window. 

"There was Madame," our friend put at last. 

"Ah!" The poet's eyes swept round with a new 
and sudden light in them. 

The point was prolific between them in the silence 
that followed. It came to them without stint that 
there was Madame. 

"Nothing by way of relief of poverty could have 
done it," our friend considered. 

The fact was before them. It sent itself crashing 
through a good deal of the flimsy structure of cur- 
rent humanitarianism around them. And after they 
had looked among the wreckage with compunction 
for the spiritual life the structure was thought to 
have housed, they turned away. They had sym- 
pathy for the ardor they saw housed there; they 
acknowledged that often there was generosity in it 
to the degree of nobility. But what, for the two of 
them as they looked into the ruins, had been re- 
vealed, was that the worship going on there was, 
simply, not spiritual. 

"You count sympathy as nothing, then, and 
service?" the poet asked, the halo of the current 
terms still lingering in his vision. "I should have 
called them spiritual." 

The other looked at him with the amused smile 
that won him the repute of hardness. 

"Until you had begun to think," he returned. 
"The trouble with the humanitarian shop is that 



1 90 A Lover of the Chair 

there is so little thinking in it. When you had begun 
to think you would have seen at once that sympathy 
was a good only when it was for a good thing, and 
service was a good only when it was for a good thing. 
But whether they minister to the life of the spirit or 
minister to chaos — that is the question. And the 
humanitarians have, by and large, simply stopped 
short of thinking out that question. They have 
stopped short of first thinking out the life of the 
spirit — the real thing — the thing itself." 

"Of which sympathy and service may be a part, 
though." 

"Ah, a tremendous part. Because there at last 
they are in their own natural homes. They sweeten 
life there, and give it warmth and kindness, socialize 
it, make it spread outward. They humanize it. Do 
I talk sentimentally?" 

"But as to Madame?" 

"What the humanitarians so egregiously don't 
rise to," commented our friend, "is just that the 
thing that carried Madame through was spiritual." 

"We've got to face the fact," amended the poet, 
"that she also had her exquisite cooking." 

"Which left her still on the spot — that spot." 

They hung upon that for a moment. 

"What isn't so easy to see," resumed the poet at 
last, "is how, if you were put to it, you could get 
those others there to take up with the qualities that 
have redeemed Madame — the spiritual ones." 

"Clearly not by putting at the bottom of our creed 
and theirs that the great difficulty was the lack of 
funds. There were many times Madame's funds in 
the horrible place next door." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 191 

"But not the cooking." 

"You come back to that. Well, the cooking was 
spiritual." 

After they had had their smile our friend took up 
the point from where he had put it. 

"I mean spiritual," he continued. "There was an 
idea in it, a conception of the thing that was good, 
a persistence in it because it was the thing that was 
good. It was a job well done — kept up, mother to 
daughter, for a score of years, and against what 
discouragements! There was the dining room, un- 
speakably bare and poor, and beautiful. They 
stuck to a virtue that was in them." 

"But they had the virtue. How about those 
others? What virtue had they?" 

"Ah, there we are," said our friend, with the glow 
of finality. 

The younger man, still fresh from his new emo- 
tions, looked up puzzled. 

"And yet I don't see just where." 

"Somewhere near the center. I mean that there's 
the great task — what's waiting to be created — the 
ideas — the current sense of the thing that's above 
all worth doing — the thing Madame had in her, 
and the things that that can stand as a type of. 
You see what I mean. Humanitarianism misses her; 
it is so hopelessly economic. The present sense of 
things misses her; it is so hopelessly economic." 

He paused a moment, and his eye lit up with 
raillery at the vein he must seem to have fallen into. 

"I see that I'm on the verge of cant," he laughed, 
"railing at economics because it is materialistic. 
Economics isn't deplorable because it's materialistic. 



192 A Lover of the Chair 

We're all of us, God help us, materialistic. It's de- 
plorable because it doesn't attack the problem. If 
we get out of the muddle we're in, it will be because 
we have found the solution elsewhere. And that 
is why Madame's seems to me so significant. For 
Madame's there in the midst of that sick spot has 
solved the problem. And the Palace hasn't; it has 
helped to create it, for all its funds. Madame had — 
how shall I say it? — an idea, a conception, taste, 
and something that made her cling to it — even 
there." 

They pondered the point for a moment. 

''I see," the poet said at last. ''And yet — " 

"And yet," the other repeated with old-time fire, 
for he had given a dying cadence to his last words. 

"And yet," the poet persisted, "the task you point 
out, the spread of right conceptions, ideas, tastes, 
is slow. Meantime — " 

"Ah, meantime," he began, and then with a re- 
turn upon himself, and the old irony that had made 
him so many enemies among those who could not 
understand him, "meantime let us sit aloof and rail 
at the age. And when we have done with railing, 
and have looked out with purged eyes on the world, 
I dare say we shall realize that the struggle is eternal 
and the problem never to be solved. Perhaps that 
is a happy thing. Utopia would be an intolerable 
place. But here taste, and intelligence, and char- 
acter have a chance to keep fit in the struggle. For 
the struggle is the thing." 

They were not quite done with Madame's. 
Summer had given way to fall when one afternoon 



In Pursuit of the Arts 193 

they resumed their dropped thread, as though, sym- 
boHcally, as the poet would once have said, their 
intellects were reviving with the dying of nature. 
Their depression at the contact of poverty was long 
past, and other interests that for a time had hung 
in abeyance had come forward again, and had 
claimed and been given an open welcome. The re- 
turn was naive and unconscious on the part of the 
poet, but the older man recognized it as that process 
of hardening that he had predicted, and that had 
seemed at the time a suggestion of his aloof cyn- 
icism. He could understand how to some it might 
seem so, but with his friend he would not have had 
it other than it was. It was a recovery of perspec- 
tive. And he preferred a poet with a perspective to 
one addition among the humanitarians. 

How far the poet had reverted, indeed, was shown 
in the fact that he returned to Madame, but took 
her up, not on the side of her relation to poverty, 
but — by what at first seemed an invisible thread — 
on the side of her relation to the arts. 

"With your scorn of the arts," he said, leaping 
to the subject from two or three removes, "you one 
day used a phrase that struck me — amazed me." 

The other looked his inquiry. 

"You spoke of Madame's taste." 

"Ah, she had taste." 

"You put it first — at the bottom." 

"Well?" 

"Haven't you rather surrendered?" 

The other looked up with the kindling eye of his 
awakened interest. 

"At discretion," he smiled. "I fancy we have 
come to an understanding." 



194 A Lover of the Chair 

''On the contrary," the poet protested, "what so 
clearly stands out to me is just that I at least 
haven't. As for you, you never doubt. But I — 
your sudden words about Madame's taste swept me 
back to my own position when I thought I had given 
it up. And there I am now." 

His friend smiled. That he never doubted was 
a note that had come to him before, and it dis- 
turbed and amused him. He had doubted almost 
everything, and perhaps most of all himself. But 
he took his ideas hard, perhaps because he had 
come to none of them without winning to them 
through a sea of doubts. 

Friends of his spoke of his course as paralleling 
the miser's. But he pointed out the liberality with 
which he showered his opinions upon them, and 
they joined his laugh and withdrew their point. 
They had the amused recollection of long winter 
afternoons and longer nights spent with him by his 
fireside, where nothing had drawn them but that 
liberality. They had disagreed with him freely, and 
sometimes been angered, or even wearied, but they 
had always come back. He had created a place 
among them, and they resorted to him, finding there 
something that they could find nowhere else. Once 
over his hospitable threshold they came into an 
atmosphere that serenified even their most stormy 
clashes. When they crossed it they left behind them 
a good deal of the world, for all the vestiges of 
Havana and Xeres that greeted them there, and 
stepped into the presence of many things that were 
large, and calm, and permanent. 
In another sense, however, the parallel of the 



In Pursuit of the Arts 195 

miser was happier. For as he grew older he grew 
more and more centered in his one pursuit, and 
though he went about more, and consorted more 
with his friends, he let the militant causes of the 
moment more and more alone. He liked ideas for 
their own sakes; and if he never lost his sense that 
life was a matter of living, and that ideas got their 
quick vitality and their human importance from 
their contact with reality, still they grew for him 
increasingly real in and for themselves. They were 
his real estate, he used to pun. And when he looked 
about him at the things that most other men 
struggled for, and got praise from the arbiters of 
the age for struggling for, they seemed as tolerable 
prey as any. To him, naturally, they seemed in- 
comparably the best. 

More than one of his critics — for he had by 
now a book or two to his credit — to his debit, alas, 
he admitted — had smiled at this passion of his, 
perceiving that for all his devotion he had somehow 
missed the note of originality. They were right, but 
they missed the point. For what he was after, as 
he himself knew when he looked back on his own 
long quest, was not the invention of new ideas. He 
had indeed the humor to doubt his prowess in that 
matter, and to blush inwardly at the supposition 
that he had been all along the champion of his own 
genius. What he was after was not novelty, but 
truth. 

There was something about that very attitude, 
it was true, that in a forgetful age might of itself 
pass for originality. It was rare enough. But his 
own value for it, characteristically, was just that it 



196 A Lover of the Chair 

was not new — it had been the attitude of the men 
he Hked best on the shelves around him. And if 
almost all of them were on the shelf, and almost 
none of them among the lively intellects of his time, 
still there he was with his passion for ideas of that 
kind. It was his own passion. 

It was for that reason, no doubt, that other men 
of ideas more original than his should find some- 
thing restful in his company, and in the equilibrium 
that even their disagreements by his fireside tended 
to make for. They came away sometimes discon- 
tent in the suspicion that their own originality 
was often a hole and corner affair, and they liked 
him for the moment none the better for that. But 
in time the suspicion that their science, or their 
aesthetics, or their humanitarianism, or their scholar- 
ship was not, after all, all that there was to be said 
about life, sent them back again reluctantly. They 
hated robustly to give up the importance of hole 
and corner, but they were, first of all, intelligent, 
and they did come back. 

None of them, perhaps, so often as the poet. He 
had a freer play of mind, and a more susceptible 
spirit, and he valued more than most of them the 
peculiar thing that he got from that contact. When 
now he put his question about Madame's taste he 
was not only genuinely touched by the problem, 
but he had a lurking, affectionate malice, and he 
liked to watch the whole apparatus of his friend's 
mind in motion to dispose of an atom. 

The disconcerting charm of that mind, however, 
was its consciousness of its own humors. Its owner 
now looked at the younger man thoughtfully, settled 



In Pursuit of the Arts 197 

himself into his great chair, and then, catching the 
gleam at the back of the poet's eye, narrowed his 
own into a smile. 

"Have you hardened — you?" he asked. 

The other sobered. He caught the echo of his 
own old phrase. 

"I've been thinking — " he began, and then 
stopped at the amusement in the glance that con- 
fronted him. He caught in it suddenly a point that 
put them a long way forward in their journey. 

"Ah, you are generous," he said. "You catch me 
home. But if I do acknowledge that there is where 
reason comes in, still — " 

It came over him in higher and higher waves, 
under the other's gaze, that there was where the 
reason did come in. He waited for a moment strug- 
gling to emerge and get his normal breath. 

"There is where the reason comes in!" he ex- 
claimed again. Then catching the malice in the 
other's smile he hurried on. "Say that I have saved 
myself from going over body and soul to the hu- 
manitarians by thinking it out, by what you call 
the reason — I see the point; I come to it. But it 
was agreed between us, wasn't it, that at the bottom, 
giving the first bent to our sense of what was good, 
was a set of primal tendencies, preferences — love 
of justice, love of beauty, religious aspiration and 
many others — and that reason came in afterward 
and judged, adjusted, umpired, proportioned be- 
tween them — did something of that nature — but 
that the first direction was given by the other thing, 
the primal aspiration. And here you have granted 
just that arrangement by putting Madame's taste at 



198 A Lover of the Chair 

the bottom of her virtue. She wanted her kind of 
thing and not the Palace kind of thing, and she stuck 
to her kind of thing against all the odds, and solved 
the problem in the end." 

"Your sketch is fair." 

"And I am thrown back upon my old position." 

"That salvation is an aesthetic matter?" 

"Just so, and in practice is to come through the 
arts." 

The older man sat for a time in thought. His 
friend studied the thoughtful face before him. 
What welled up in it before long was a kindHng 
look of amused intention. 

"Will you go on a quest?" he asked. 

The poet nodded. He knew those reflective urban 
adventures of his host. For the most part they 
were undertaken alone, but he had sometimes been 
admitted to a share in them, as but now at 
Madame's. Or was it that when his friend went 
with him his pleasures became reflective adven- 
tures? At all events he knew how the ordinary set 
pleasures of the city looked pale and tasted flat 
after them, not from any austere disapproval arising 
from the stern spectacle that often they had to con- 
template, but rather from the richer pleasure of the 
adventures themselves. Their comedy was real; 
it was organic; it enriched the very life they were 
leading. An hour's browsing in some second-hand 
book shop, half reading, half catching beyond the 
edge of the book the dusty life of the place, and its 
dusty owner, and its dusty frequenters, left him 
deeper memories than most pleasures could leave. 
Once they had sat out a gloomy afternoon in the 



In Pursuit of the Arts 199 

workshop of a solitary bookbinder, and listened, 
while the deft fingers performed the most delicate 
tooling, to a Rabelaisian flow of coarse humor and 
honest wit. And the books that came from that 
bindery had thereafter another flavor. 

Their present adventure was to be of a different 
kind, but still it was to have the stamp of belonging 
to the life they were leading. The poet, remotely 
at first, was beginning to catch the savor of this 
love of the organic, this passion for weaving the 
parts of his daily life into a broad pattern, and this 
tying in of loose threads. The old glitter of dis- 
connected change and variety lost, for moments, 
its charm. At times he laid it reluctantly to the 
recession of his youth — and perhaps it was age 
that was changing him. But at other times he 
could wish that his youth itself had squandered 
itself less in disconnected change and variety — 
had built itself in more structurally. And in such 
moods he lent himself more reliantly to his older 
companion, who, in revenge, never seemed to him 
old, but rather to have kept a quiet zest of youth 
about him. 

He sat now with the smile of anticipation in his 
eye. 

"All we shall need in our scrip," he said, "is a 
single curiosity. If it was taste that Madame 
started with, had it any relation to art?'^ 

"Where shall you take me?" 

"Into the most curious places in the world." 

It was autumn and the season was on. Ex- 
hibits were opened, concerts and operas were be- 
ginning, coteries were eager with the summer^s 



200 A Lover of the Chair 

arrears of novelties. A new Russian dancer was 
being widely announced. Two Russian novelists 
had just been translated. From France came word 
of a revolutionary school of painting. A colossal 
symphony was to come from Vienna interpreting 
the gist of Nietzsche's philosophy. The great uni- 
versities were announcing the growth of amateur 
play-acting, amateur story-writing, and aesthetic 
dancing, in place of intellectual studies. Vers libre 
was bringing in a wholly new group of poets. The 
season indeed promised to be lively in aesthetic 
circles. 

The two friends set out. They missed nothing. 
Their experiences accumulated. Before the end of 
the autumn something began to emerge — it was 
the comedy of their pursuit. They admitted that 
if it had not emerged they would have had to de- 
sist before they came to the point. They saw 
indeed much that was good; some things that were 
noble. But their concern was not primarily with 
objects of art; it was with the human spectacle. 
And the human spectacle in those purlieus repaid 
them. 

The poet developed a new note in his laughter. 
It crept in first one night as he saw the solemnity 
with which two avid-eyed young poets watched the 
lithe, slim body of the Russian dancer, and took 
what went on inside them for their souls. A kind 
of sickness had already mingled with his laugh at 
their murmured confidences; it was with horror 
that he heard them, in fervid tones, quote a couplet 
of his own: 



In Pursuit of the Arts 201 

Oh, dusty, impure question — Is she pure? 
It is enough that she is beautiful. 

When he dared he stole a look at his companion; 
he hoped that the murmurs had passed him un- 
heard, or the lines been unrecognized. But he 
could glean nothing from the serene countenance 
by his side. 

Surreptitiously one day he looked into the two 
Russian novelists. Something had come over him; 
they had the Russian quality, but they amused 
him. Once that Russian poignancy had set up a 
great tumult in his emotions, and like the two poets 
in the balcony, he had used to discover soul in that 
tumult. This time as he read he seemed to catch 
the secret of it. Multitudinous, formless, stormy, 
hopeless, they saw life with their keen, barbaric 
senses and nothing more. Their stuff was not or- 
dered, intellectualized. It meant nothing; and 
they could make nothing of it. It was a welter. 

In his own poetry, following the great tradition, 
he knew that his pain and labor had been, for all 
his vacuous protest, to make intelligible, to in- 
terpret. Even in the couplet that he groaned to 
remember he had tried to reinterpret the significance 
of beauty. He might like to blot those particular 
lines — would give a good deal to just now — but 
their intention had been a significant intention. 
These somber minds, however, understood nothing, 
put nothing in order, tried to put nothing in order, 
gloried in their tumultuous disarray. They 
rendered up the chaos, not because they understood 



202 A Lover of the Chair 

it, but because it was there. They lugged it out, 
not to say something true about it, but to heap it 
up and gloom around in their hopeless helplessness 
before it. 

He smiled as he welcomed the sudden release 
from his old obsession. He felt in himself a sudden 
peace in the clarity of his understanding. And he 
smiled again, partly at himself, and partly at the 
simplicity of the perception — that peace came 
just from the escape from chaos, just from the un- 
derstanding, the putting things in order. He 
caught, consciously for the first time, the point of 
literature. 

He had not thought it all out before a new ex- 
perience sent the two friends wandering through 
the streets in comfortable release from an evening 
of local chaos of their own. They had gone to- 
gether to a dinner at an artistic and literary house. 
They had been charmed by the simple beauty of 
the interior, the costumes of the ladies, the appoint- 
ments of linen and crystal and silver of the dining 
room, the rich draperies and pictures and rugs of 
the drawing room. At dinner the talk had begun. 
The poet felt uncomfortable. The Russian novel- 
ists, the colossal symphony interpreting Nietzsche, 
the cubists, the futurists, vers libre, went into the 
crucible of talk and came out glowing. Strauss's 
"wrangling inharmonies," Matisse's "tremendous 
barbarities," futurist "mysteries" fell from cul- 
tured lips without the smile of judgment. They 
were the "movement of art." 

There was the charm of exclamation, of en- 
thusiasm, of bandied allusion, of soft lights, of 



In Pursuit of the Arts 203 

modulated voices, of the near presence of an au- 
thor and a sculptor. But the poet was un- 
comfortable. He suddenly saw it from the out- 
side. He saw it with his understanding. For a 
moment he could regret the brightly colored land 
of illusion and irresponsibility he was leaving. It 
was endeared by so nearly everything that endears. 
And he was quitting it for a drab land of disillu- 
sionment and responsibility. He wondered for a 
moment why he was going. Then he knew that 
he couldn't help it. Back of his senses and his 
delights there was something else that understood 
and smiled. And that something else was he. 

What supported him over the moment of regret 
was the shocking recollection that it was just in 
such circles as these that all the horrors of the 
Russian novelists, and frantic French decadence, 
and German unintelligibility got their passport. 
Here at least art had not done the thing that he 
had always defended it for doing. It had not 
created a sure taste for beauty even in matters 
simply artistic. And as for those other, wider 
values of taste — as for Madame's . . . 

"It isn't beauty we're after now," someone was 
saying near him. "We've changed all that. What 
we're after is reahty." 

He had heard that implicitly said a hundred 
times before; now he listened with wonder. He 
remembered the Russian novelists with a vengeance. 

Once or twice in the course of the evening he 
caught his friend's eye, lonely, observant, reflective, 
amused. He himself had turned away, his sensi- 
tiveness to what was going on around him 



204 A Lover of the Chair 

heightened to the point of pain. Finally he hunted 
him out, and when they decently could they 
departed. 

Once on the moonlit street he got his arm under 
that of his companion and turned him toward one 
of their old haunts by the lake. He was in no 
mood for loneliness or sleep. 

It was an Indian summer night, crystal above, 
and a thin haze among the tree-trunks and over 
the meadows of the park. For half a mile they 
walked in silence. Then the poet laughed. 

"After all," he said, "these people are only cari- 
catures of the real thing." 

"The air is better here," his friend returned. 
After a moment, pausing by the wooded edge of 
a lagoon, he asked, "Are those Lombardy poplars 
or cypresses?" and waved his hand toward a row 
of slender trees that shot up out of the mist into 
the clear moonlight above. 

"I don't know; they are beautiful." 

They stood a moment watching them, and then 
passed on. 

"Why beautiful?" the older man mused. 

"I don't know. Once I could have given you 
mystic reasons. To-night I don't know. All I can 
say is that they are beautiful." 

"Aesthetics, then?" 

"It seems a little too simple, but you found the 
trees beautiful?" 

"Yes." 

"I dare say most men would." 

"Well?" 

"Well, perhaps that is aesthetics." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 205 

''You are humble to-night." 

The poet laughed. "I've been humbled," he 
said. "I've been in such company before — been 
part of it — and now I've seen it. What I can't 
help seeing is that it's just the people brought up 
on art that are wishing on us all these things that 
aren't beautiful. It hasn't given them taste." 

"Perhaps those things are beautiful to them." 

"If they are, then aesthetics is anything — and 
nothing — whatever you like." 

"That is what you have just said about the 
trees." 

"No. When I spoke I was thinking about men 
by and large, to-day and yesterday — of some- 
thing with a touch of universality — not anything 
that anybody likes at any time, but something that 
lies deeper, is more fundamental — something 
based on their common sense of the thing. Do I 
talk cant?" 

"No. But you go in a circle." 

"Not that all men have it," the poet spun on, 
"or even most men, but some men." 

He paused. The other was silent, attentive; in 
his eye was a gleam of appreciative irony. 

"From this point on I stumble," the poet con- 
tinued, a touch of hopeless humor struggling in his 
voice. "I know what I mean by beauty; I know 
what I think is beautiful. I know that I fall in 
with certain others, love what they love. And that 
is what I praise. Other things I hate; I abhor 
Matisse. Well, I dare say Matisse hates what I 
love, and in general uses my own language to 
justify himself and condemn me, mutatis mutandis. 



2o6 A Lover of the Chair 

Does it get me anywhere to say that the best taste 
is that which refines on the common sense of beauty 
of the race. At least it indicates a standard and 
a direction. It isn't quite anarchy. But what is 
clear about the present is that we have a prodigious 
art and it is anarchic, and a prodigious aesthetic 
public brought up on it, and it doesn't make for 
beauty." 

They had come to the lake shore and had ad- 
justed themselves on a bench. The moon lay shat- 
tered on the rough water, and the pebbles grated 
with the rush and recession of the waves on the 
sloping beach at their feet. But the poet's mind 
was preoccupied. Suddenly he looked up. 

"I have said that now for the third time," he 
laughed. ^'And Madame, I begin to believe, didn't 
belong to aesthetic circles." 

They hung in assent upon that for a while, and 
the silence and the warm night, and the wind and 
the waves and the moonlight were glorious about 
them. 

"But the real thing," the older man said at last, 
" — aren't you a little hard on the real thing?" 

"There's something to be said for that," the 
other returned. "I get a glimpse here, now, that 
I don't quite catch clearly. It's a glimpse of art 
as a kind of final product, a last expression, of 
whatever taste we have, — a kind of ultimate 
flower — " 

"Hence the fluttering of our infinite butterflies," 
the older man threw in. 

"Ah," the other smiled. "And perhaps they 
have their use in spreading the pollen. But I don't 
like to see it all left in their hands." 



In Pursuit of the Arts 207 

"Whose then?" 

''There we are!" the poet exclaimed. "We shall 
have to think it out." 

There was their point. They laughed. The 
poet threw in one more phrase: 

"In relation to all the other things they so egre- 
giously don't think about at all." 

There was another matter that had dropped by 
the way, and the older man, with his uneasiness at 
the consciousness of untied threads, reverted to it. 

"We have left Madame unexplained," he said. 

"And I dare say we shall, even in the end," the 
poet replied, "but we've rescued her from the 
aestheticists." 

"And ourselves. But there's something else. I 
go back always to your conception of the soul. 
And I can't help thinking that if Madame had had 
a fish shop instead of her restaurant she would 
still have solved her problem, by virtue of some- 
thing else in her that we should not have been 
tempted to call aesthetic — a satisfaction to some 
inner demand in her nature — some other prefer- 
ence of her soul — that somehow she had caught 
a glimpse of and fostered until she would have 
been unhappy to thwart it. Whether in some 
transcendental sense you wish to call the ultimate 
attractiveness of that impulse (Esthetic — " 

"Ah," the poet interposed, "but with that range 
of attractiveness art has nothing to do. You involve 
us with Croce and the decadent philosophers." 

"And there we are at last," his friend returned. 

As they wandered homeward through the dim 
park our friend remembered how in his youth an 



2o8 A Lover of the Chair 

older friend of his had said words that had clarified 

his own vision, and how he had come afterwards 

at midnight to the lake shore and sat on the bench 

they had but now quitted, to calm and adjust his 

dizzy thoughts. And now, as he looked at the poet, ^^ 

whose friendly arm was linked in his, he wondered 11 

hopefully whether he himself had not at last, and 

in his own way, handed on the torch. 



PART TWO 



POOR RICHARD 

LONG afterwards, in the desultory reading of 
his more settled years, he came one day 
upon a passage that set him in pursuit of his own 
childhood. In the raucous comedy of his ado- 
lescence, in the later years of his sophomoric 
militancy, and in the unheroic dullness of middle 
life, that childhood had never for long failed to 
come flashing back upon him at inexplicable 
moments, from unexpected sensations too faint to 
have caught for themselves his reflective attention. 
Yellow sunlight falling through trees upon a wall; 
vague odors in a country lane of a summer after- 
noon; the luminous blue that sometimes whitens 
the sky at the horizon on a windy morning; a 
moment's harmony of thirds in voices or instru- 
ments at random windows or in the droning tones 
of street organs — such sensations, without reason 
of exceptional beauty or traceable reminiscence 
brought back to him for lingering half hours the 
limpid emotions of his boyhood. 

At such moments, so affecting were the contrasts 
with the grayer tones of his current life that he 
clung to his vision with eagerness, with a romantic 
sense that there was something infinitely desirable 



210 A Lover of the Chair 

in the innocence and purity of his childhood's out- 
look. He had seemed of late to be losing, through 
the hardening sophistication of time, deep and 
moving and intimate values that thought and 
knowledge were bringing no adequate compensa- 
tions for. His more normal moments tried to re- 
assure him; but he mistrusted his more normal 
moments, knowing that they knew nothing of the 
magic of his occasional moments. The inner con- 
viction of reality that intensified these emotions 
never haunted his hours of objective thought. 

So it came about that his childhood clung to his 
consciousness with a persistence that he did nothing 
to discourage; and though as the years went on the 
flashes of the old light fell less and less frequently 
on the world that he looked out upon, he still had 
occasional glimpses of it to thrill him and darken 
the moments of commonplace return. 

It was with curious eyes, therefore, that he came 
one day upon the record of the life of a child who 
had died at ^'5 yeares and 3 days old onely ... a 
prodigy for wit and understanding," and whose 
story had come down over a gap of nearly three 
centuries because the father, who had paused over 
his affairs to drop a tear "of grief and affliction," 
was that courtly diarist of an age so peculiarly re- 
mote from ours — John Evelyn. The record was 
the more moving that the grief with which the few 
lines were penned seemed so largely irrelevant. 
The pathos to modern hearts seemed to lie not so 
much in the loss of what the father mourned, as 
in the thought that it was there at all to be lost. 

For "at 2 yeares and halfe old he could per- 



Poor Richard 211 

fectly reade any of the English, Latine, French, or 
Gotic letters, pronouncing the three first lan- 
guages exactly. He had before the 5 th yeare, or 
in that yeare . . . got by heart almost the entire 
vocabularie of Latine and French primitives and 
words, could make congruous syntax, turn Latin 
into English and vice versa, construe and prove 
what he read, and did the government and use of 
relatives, verbs, substantives, elipses, and many 
figures and tropes — made considerable progress 
in Comenius's Janua . . . and had a strong passion 
for Greeke. The number of verses he could re- 
cite was prodigious, and what he remembered of 
the parts of playes. He understood the historical 
parts of the Bible and New Testament to a wonder. 
He was far from childish in anything he said or 
did/' 

Poor little Richard, ''incomparable hopeful 
blossome!" 

And yet the reader of this sad record, conscious 
of a childhood of his own so unspeakably different, 
and wont to regret the loss of just those things that 
had made it so different, found himself out of all 
wont, through a perverse habit of mind, looking 
back at his own so much happier case with no 
little doubts. 

It had indeed been a childhood rich in the things 
that are thought of as peculiar to childhood. The 
little town in which he had been born was spread 
out upon long hills in a country half forested and 
half tilled, broken into small woods and fields like 
the background of an old print. He could see 
from the hilltop of his own world a broad shallow 



212 A Lover of the Chair 

valley and hills beyond, blocked with color and set 
with the half-hidden gleaming white houses pe- 
culiar to that countryside. He remembered it 
always in the high colors of spring and fall, and 
always in sunshine. 

The town itself — to him big, menacing, al- 
luring, to be invaded for short distances, and to be 
fled from in terror till the click of the gate shut 
it out behind him — lay beneath his hilltop in 
clear and bright hues. Its cobblestones, swept 
and garnished, its tall spires, its crowding trees, 
made up a magic region seen from within the gate, 
prolific of benevolent peddlers whose great carts 
at a gesture sprang open to reveal sesamic treasures 
exchangeable for worthless heaps of rags and 
papers; of strange terrifying dogs of another race 
than the kindly and understanding mongrel of his 
own world; of damp and jocularly clad fishmongers 
whose stirring horns summoned a wrappered and 
capped population to morning gossip at the gutter; 
of rare organ grinders whose droning pipes, nearing 
and retreating, fused with the lazy colors of the 
afternoon. 

Behind the walls of his own world his most 
bizarre relationships were with trees. Touches of 
human expression in them caught in him quick 
responses. There was a dwarfed oak whose an- 
gularity was touched with pathos by a friendly, 
deprecating way it had of holding out its large, 
frank leaves; a dandified maple that cradled long 
his ambitions and at last his scratched and 
trembling body; an eccentric, reserved russet 
apple tree that stood aloof from the common ram- 



Poor Richard 213 

bows and guarded the stable door. If such in- 
terpretations were childish he was indeed a child, 
and long custom gave to them a kind of reasonable- 
ness that he had no wish to refute. 

There was something less explicable but more 
moving in the sharp impressiveness of a deep and 
gloomy grove that lay beyond the cobblestones 
across the way. In the morning when a low sun 
fell upon its front it held only such terrors as might 
with high courage be defied to the edge of the 
shadows. He remembered one such adventure 
when he had fought off his fear even beyond the 
sunlight, and though he had failed at the last 
moment to bring off the precious buckeye that had 
lured him so far — for terror seized him while his 
fingers were still short of the prize — his experience 
served to rationalize the situation for his future 
guidance. Thereafter of a morning he could walk 
without fear to the edge of the dense shade, know- 
ing that fear was powerless to come upon him 
across the barrier. And if he taunted it with its 
impotence as he strutted up and down the irregular 
line, his temerity was not without a defiant courage 
against the possible moment when a passing cloud 
might wipe out the bounds and leave him in its 
clutches. 

Sunset was the time, however, when the grove 
assumed its most fascinating terrors, when the still- 
bright sky behind it left it black and impenetrable. 
To his ear, on windless evenings, came strange, 
subdued movements, subtle treads, soft whisper- 
ings, filling the grove with the undefined mani- 
festations of the objective thing that he had never 



214 A Lover of the Chair 

wholly distinguished from his subjective fear. The 
grove was the haunt of owls whose evening awaken- 
ings filled the darkness with mysterious questions; 
and with brooding doves whose notes near and far 
seemed to come from no separate source, but 
rather to be the mournful voice of the woods them- 
selves. 

By no means all of his hours were spent so es- 
sentially alone as was inevitable in the presence of 
such moving perceptions. His world behind the 
high, vine-hung walls of the garden was, naturally 
it seemed to him, the gathering place for others 
from without. But in some ways, in spite of 
brothers and of neighbors of his own age, just as 
he found a difference between his own and the 
outer world, he discovered a difference between 
himself and those around him more subtle than 
the common daily difference, and sharply separa- 
tive even when they were boisterously present 
about him. Sometimes when they were closest he 
would find a barrier shutting him in most narrowly. 
It was exaggerated, extreme, but it foreshadowed 
the faculty that later played its determining part 
in his life. 

Suddenly when the play was lulled there would 
come over him a troubling sense of inner isolation. 
The stones, the grass about him, the companions 
whom he could touch with his hand, his own body, 
and the heat of the sun or the cool of the breeze, 
the sounds and odors that came to him clearly, 
seemed but the dream-spun creations of his 
thought, illusions that no test of the senses could 
dispel. His senses themselves were in no better 



Poor Richard 215 

case. Even his thoughts^ projecting the outer 
world before him, became objective presences be- 
fore an ultimate consciousness that he always came 
to at last before the bubble of his troubled per- 
ceptions broke. 

When this illusion of an illusion had passed and 
the world about him had resumed its external re- 
ality he had no wish and no power to bring it back. 
That it was an illusion he felt with all the clarity 
of his more normal moments. In time such rare 
moments ceased to trouble him, but the recollection 
of them never so wholly departed that he lost the 
sense of an aloof consciousness from which to look 
out even upon his own thoughts and feelings. 

The occasions that were most likely to bring such 
imaginings were otherwise curiously intimate. 
There lay in the midst of the garden a broad flat 
stone covering the mouth of an ancient well, and 
its afternoon coolness in the shade of a low syringa 
no doubt conduced to the invention of a form of 
play unusually sociable. To fill their pockets in 
their journeys into the outer world with lumps of 
colored sandstone; to search for days among the 
gravel for precious "keels"; and then to sit on the 
well-stone in a circle of five or six, and grind, stone 
upon stone, hour upon hour of a summer's after- 
noon, watching their cones of colored sand grow 
tall, and tinting them with the powdery dust of 
the "keels" — such was their favorite pastime. 
And in those hours to talk out of depths of inno- 
cence and ignorance! They had seen five or six 
or seven winters, and their world was a small 
garden on the edge of a small town. And yet they 



2i6 A Lover of the Chair 

talked of history and politics, of wars and parties. 
If a maturer cynicism would have found no con- 
tradiction there, finding no need of knowledge or 
experience for endless talk or bitter partisanship, 
it would here have been disarmed by the innocence 
of the malice from which such animation arose. 
A powderhorn from Revolutionary days, and a 
sword from the Civil War, hanging in the paternal 
hallway near the portraits of the ancestors to whom 
they had been grim enough instruments of fight, 
had stirred their imaginations and kindled their 
loyalties. In their hearts, still too tender to hurt 
a robin or a toad, it was a secret grief that the 
spots of stain and rust were not from the blood of 
their enemies. And the names British and Rebel 
gave whispering intensity to hours of peaceful 
grinding. 

To his later amused reflections the thought that 
politics had stolen into the garden and laid its 
shadow upon their minds seemed an incongruous 
touch upon the idyllic aloofness of his childhood. 
But he knew that in reality it had hardly been 
so — that the bare names of parties about which 
their talk had played had had no content, were but 
stirring connotations calling for loyalty and hos- 
tility — much perhaps as in the grown-up world — 
and not unfit for association with that other 
connotation which they called God. They had 
not seemed incongruous then, and the association 
was made promptly and loyally. God was a 
Republican. 

Though his childhood was perhaps unusually 
full of companionship — of children, of servants, 



Poor Richard 217 

whose work never ceased to seem to him some su- 
perior form of play, of the whole range of relatives, 
from the visiting ones of his own years in eternally 
clean frocks, to the reverend elder whose pro- 
digious hat and gold-headed cane seemed the very 
crown and scepter of life — the moments which 
most colored his later reveries were the moments 
when he was most alone. He was not lonely or 
melancholy. It was perhaps that in unwonted si- 
lences his mind caught best the faint responses of 
his own spirit. 

It was in such moments that the clear brightness 
of colors stole upon his conscious senses — the 
deeper tones of the garden, the contrasts of the 
grove against the sunset, the harmonies of the out- 
look across the town and the hills, and perhaps 
more than all the cloudless sky, remote, varied, 
eternal, without detail of distracting substance, the 
essence of the emotion of color. It was to the 
purity of such perceptions that his later moments 
made their magic return, adding to their own 
effectiveness the deeper note of reminiscence, and 
binding his life together in a cumulative pattern of 
sensuous emotion. 

Though his life was thus largely healthfully out 
of doors the house too was rich for him, though in 
a different way. There were characteristic colors 
there too, indeed, and he never lost the moving 
sense of atmospheres that breathed from the har- 
monies of subdued light in certain well-loved 
rooms — particularly a library in whose deep- 
orange draperies and rugs, brown leather chairs, 



2i8 A Lover of the Chair 

and brown books, he never in after years ceased 
to find the spirit of leisurely reading — warmth, 
and quiet, and a calm cheerfulness. Often when 
the sun of a late winter afternoon began to sink 
and yellow in the west and blend with the warm 
tones of the draperies, he would come hither, and 
unconscious of the causes that at once stirred and 
soothed him, would sit in quiet, watching the 
deepening colors till the growing darkness brought 
imaginings more in keeping with the house itself. 

He had his shrinkings from the dark when it 
found him lingering over his play in the garden; 
but his fears there were simple and direct — frank 
terror of the invisible and the unknown. Within, 
however, when the light faded and the quiet 
robbed his senses of their immediate occupations 
and assurances, the invisible became populous with 
a curious company of silent, recurrent figures, 
habitues of his half-frightenedj half-fascinated 
fancy. They took possession of their accustomed 
spots and bound him to his accustomed chair — 
old people for the most part, with white hair and 
thin white hands, seated by the fireplace or standing 
in reverie by the windows ; the tall figure of a priest 
forever mounting the stairway to the silent 
chambers above, and through the rooms a woman 
moving to and fro in stately sorrow. In time repe- 
tition eased his fears and gave his awe a touch of 
friendliness, but it never eased the weight of an 
undefined sadness that hovered over that silent 
household. 

It must have been — so his maturer reason 
went — that the darkness gave too sharp a sensi- 



Poor Richard 219 

tiveness to his imagination, and that the broad 
lines of his first fanciful pictures were too vivid to 
be escaped from again. At all events his imagina- 
tion worked more normally and subtly and with 
much more variety by day, though it worked with 
much the same materials. Out of what old pic- 
tures in books or on the walls, old costumes in attic 
chests, slow reminisences of elders by the winter 
fire, his imagery was pieced, his later memories 
found scattered though incomplete traces. But it 
is certain that in the house by day when the others 
were absent, or quiet, or better still in distant 
rooms in murmuring conversation, his mind was 
filled with pleasant pictures of a life varied, full, 
quite different from his own, and always changing. 
They never ceased to be fancies. But they had 
more than the thin evanescence of his out-door 
play. They were clothed with reality, and with 
an authority that he respected to at least this 
degree — that if he let his fancy play within doors 
it was they who had the right to people it. Out of 
doors his fancy was gothic, filled with dwarfs and 
talking birds and animate stones. There there was 
no restraint upon him. But within he was rigidly 
humane. The house itself gave the suggestion for 
this difference, no doubt, and he followed the law 
it imposed. It was old and homely, and filled with 
the simple accumulation of more than one genera- 
tion of his ancestors. It was a house, and so a 
human product, and his response was to act in 
kind. Many years later, searching seriously among 
his tastes and preferences, he found a complete and 
vivid ideal of a quiet and full domesticity whose 



220 A Lover of the Chair 

axiomatic values went back for their sanction to 
these early fanciful responses to the spirit of the 
house. 

His childhood lasted on much these terms until 
his thirteenth or fourteenth year. There was 
growth and development, it is true, but in kind it 
remained little changed. It was a healthy child- 
hood, and if there was a more than usual dreami- 
ness and objective make-believe there was in that 
no distorting asymmetry. He was frankly and 
pleasantly undeluded by his fancies. And it was 
a very natural childhood in the full modern sense 
of that term. If he had learned good manners it 
had been less by precept than by having nothing 
else to imitate. No doubt he had had his moments 
of wilfulness that were punished, and of selfishness 
that were rebuked. But they were less significant 
than the unconscious influence of a kindly home. 

In the early part of his childhood he was taught 
nothing consciously. If he learned his letters in 
his fifth year it was the accidental reflection of an 
elder brother's learning, picked up as he had picked 
up the names of colors among the stones and 
"keels" of his play, or as he had picked up the 
syllables from the backs of the Britannica on the 
library shelves before he could read in his primer, 
and with no sense of their significance. The li- 
brary, where he spent long hours of winter after- 
noons, and where indeed he listened to readings 
that flashed strange pictures upon his mind, had no 
distinct meaning for him. He took the books there 
for granted. They were among the natural conditions 
of existence, like the house and the garden. 



Poor Richard 221 

In the latter half of his childhood he went to 
school, it is true, but school came to him in the 
natural course of events, just as he fell into the 
way of the immemorial games that children have 
never let die. There was nothing in his going that 
savored either of compulsion or privilege. And in 
the school there was nothing to reveal the sharp 
change, for which the school stands, from bar- 
barism to urbanity. For the modern kindly 
methods of teaching had already begun to dis- 
place the older harsh tyranny of the traditional 
schoolmaster. He glided into the precincts of 
learning, therefore, on the wings of play. He 
learned without knowing that he learned. And 
his school hours, like those in the garden, were 
happily spontaneous. He had not, to be sure, 
fallen heir to the full development of this sym- 
pathetic method. And before the end of his child- 
hood he encountered rebelliously enough teachers 
who derived from the older traditions. Defeat, 
chagrin, and his first suffocation sense of impo- 
tence before tyranny came upon him memorably 
from these experiences; but they were too rare to 
break his spirited opposition or alter his long- 
confirmed attitude toward the school. He remained 
to the time of his adolescence a child of play. 

So it was that years later, when his habits of 
make-believe had turned insensibly into habits of 
reflection and reverie, he could look back upon a 
childhood peculiarly natural and spontaneous. It 
was a childhood unusually happy, and though com- 
monplace in its environment and external equip- 
ment and not uncommon in its internal tempera- 



222 A Lover of the Chair 

ment and native gifts^ yet of its kind and in itself 
rarely perfect. 

It was with troubling surprise, therefore, that he 
found himself not so wholly shocked as it seemed 
to him he should have been at the pitiful record of 
that child of the older century, who had died at 
"5 yeares and 3 days old onely, after considerable 
progress in Comenius's Janua and with a strong 
passion for Greeke.'^ It seemed to him that he 
ought to have looked with horror upon a code that 
could permit such a life and cause such a death. 
Instead he began to have doubts of the code that 
had guided his own first years. It had always been 
a matter of thankfulness with him that his child- 
hood was beyond the reach of circumstance, and 
would remain for him perfect no matter what un- 
toward straits he might fall into. And now an 
ironic fate, changing his point of view, told him 
that neither his childhood nor anything past, 
present, or future, was beyond the reach of cir- 
cumstance. He felt no bitterness. His childhood 
still shed its moving and illuminating reflections 
upon his present. But reflectively, and with the 
calmer emotions that go with the rational per- 
ceptions, he came to see a curious waste running 
through it. 

His old sense of its value was indeed still posi- 
tive. It was, he still saw, a perfect childhood, from 
the point of view of childhood; and he never 
ceased to have moments of protest that this ten- 
derly luminous and rich thing should be anything 
less than an end in itself — should be a means to 
an end grosser and tougher than itself — should 



Poor Richard 223 

need therefore to be twisted out of its own bent to 
serve as a beginning for something less delicately 
appealing and less perfectible. But he knew that 
childhood was not the end of life in point of pur- 
pose any more than in point of time; and though 
he gave over the attempt to define that purpose, 
he knew that the most romantic, though they had 
been known to put it to a child to solve, had never 
attained even to that wisdom until they had ceased 
irrevocably to be children. 

So it was that though he was touched with a 
half angered pity when he came one day upon the 
grief-stricken words of that courtly father mourn- 
ing the death of a child who had been so ''far from 
childish in anything he said or did," he saw a little 
way past his own prejudice to something that lay 
behind the shocking cruelty of that little tragedy. 
He saw it perhaps the more readily in recollection 
of the violent shifting and tossing and aimless pain 
of his own later years of adolescence, and the help- 
lessness of his youth. For he saw that however 
exaggerated was the case of poor Richard Evelyn, 
it had been animated by an idea perhaps nearer 
the truth than the idea of his own. It had looked 
forward. It had looked forward to something that 
he came strongly to realize the lack of in his own 
mature spirit. And when he glanced thoughtfully 
about him, nation wide, at his own generation, 
brought up in ways not very different from his own, 
he saw that they too had missed it. 

This sense of loss took objective expression for 
him in the commonly observed lack of poetry of 
his time and people. But this lack seemed to him 



224 A Lover of the Chair 

significant of something larger. It was itself more 
than an objective lack to be deplored. And it was 
not to be explained by the garish newness of his 
country. When his country had been newer still 
it had been richer in just that thing. What he 
detected in himself and in the intellectual quahty 
of the times was a lack of that richness of con- 
sciousness and that clarity and simplicity of vision 
that finds its expression sometimes in poetry but is 
essentially the same for the deepest and justest 
thought upon human affairs in whatever form. 

This observation, which he had long shared in- 
deed as a commonplace with many thoughtful ob- 
servers of American life, came now into a new 
association in his mind. His childhood had been 
typical, typical at least in the influences that had 
formed it. And he saw something in those influ- 
ences that it seemed not fanciful to connect with 
his own and his country's deficiency. He himself 
had had a strong impulse toward poetry. It had 
been dogged enough, and had kept him in his later 
years tied to his poets, his prosody, his tropes, his 
diffident exercise book, long enough to have caused 
him a mild and humorous surprise at the meager- 
ness of his output — a meagerness not so much of 
bulk as of substance. 

He was not looking for genius in himself; he 
was looking for pedestrian respectability. But 
when he came to write he had nothing respectable 
to say. The flashes from his childhood that came 
upon him, intense and simple, luminous with the 
lyric essence, brought with the force of their im- 
pulse and the limpid clarity of their outlook nothing 



Poor Richard 225 

to look upon. His perceptions had played, in those 
younger years, upon a substance which maturity 
could never broaden or deepen. The moments 
when his young spirit had first entered his per- 
ceptions had been occupied with matter which his 
growing mind could never expand — sounds and 
odors, forms and colors which were the same to 
his childhood as they would ever be to his youth 
and his age. 

And they had determined his deepest preoccu- 
pations. These preoccupations had intensified 
wastefully only the changeless uniform percep- 
tions, the common intuitions of sense for which 
the single word suffices — things static, impene- 
trable to thought, useless alike to the discursive 
reason and to the significant element of poetic ex- 
pression. His childhood years had spent their lyric 
enlightenment upon the simple bodily sensations, 
and not upon those moving relations that range in 
the human field and give to the objects of sense 
that significance that makes them humane. 

The result was a poetry like most of the poetry 
of his age and country, a poetry not without a cer- 
tain visual charm and grace in the concrete ele- 
ments, but in its thought either vapid or else 
crudely expository. Actually his best fell far be- 
low the best of its time, but it had the contemporary 
quality. There was one set of stanzas that he had 
long saved, at first for extraneous reasons, and 
afterwards for the completeness with which they 
seemed to express the wistful, sweetly nostalgic 
thinness of his typical culture. 



2 26 A Lover of the Chair 

Here, long leagues from the burdened town 

Where memories crowd and fret, 
Leagues along on the trackless down 

Let us wander and forget. 

How were we to remember here 

Tidings of yesterday, 
Where die June winds, sweeping the heavens clear 
Of flocking cloud and smoke-rack drear, 

Drive the soul's mists away? 

Had we not ere last year's seeds were sown 

Wailed ills now suffered not? 
Shall we not ere this year's seeds are strown 

To-day's ills have forgot? 

Were it not enough that the warm June wind 

Play in your tangled hair? 
Were it not enough in the grass to find 
Starry daisies and rue entwined 

With phlox for your tresses fair? 

Shall we lament while the shepherd sun. 
That has shone for his shepherd lovers 

Since old Theocritus' race was run, 
High in his June flight hovers? 

Can we think back to the first spring days 
On the boon of life and the years — 

The boon of the taste of life — and gaze 

In our hearts where a deathless minstrel plays 

His fresh and young and eternal lays. 
And still shed present tears? 

Here on the leagues of the trackless earth 
The warring will is merged 



Poor Richard 227 

Into the Mother that gave it birth, 
By a thousand voices urged — 

The querulous cry of the land-lost tern 

Vain-searching for the sea, 
Rock nooks where tiger lilies burn. 
The shaded damps of the maiden fern, 
Wild rose scents where we may discern 

Nature's sweet alchemy. 

Here where the waist-high thistle vaunts 

His sky-kissed purple flame, 
Here where the mullein's high shaft taunts 

Primrose of sad sweet name. 

How were we, where the crocus first 

Broke through the runneled snow. 
And where the proud shy violet erst 
Forth on the high March noonday burst. 

To renew our meed of woe? 

And you, love, when your dreaming eyes 

Lift yearning to the sun. 
Does not your soul lose its own emprise. 
Its own impatience, its own surmise. 
And feel at rest with the earth and the skies. 

With the universe at one? 

Here, then, leagues from the troubled town 

With its ceaseless surge and fret. 
Leagues along on the trackless down 

Let us wander, and forget. 

There it was, simple, sensuous, rhythmic — in- 
stinct with the accessories and perfectly innocent 
of significance. 

When at last he had come to realize that the end 



2 28 A Lover of the Chair 

of maturity was not merely to thrill in his child- 
hood fashion at the intensity of his perceptions, but 
rather to find the human significance of them, he 
did indeed turn his mind from this fruitless ex- 
ercise to thought itself. And though he suspected 
himself of lacking even in his logical processes a 
foundation that an earlier start might have af- 
forded him, it was not so much that he was not 
able to think logically as that his thinking was in 
a way hard and geometrical. It lacked in a certain 
mellow harmony of reason and emotion, a full rich- 
ness and depth, a lyric illumination, that he knew 
was the essence of the deepest humane expression. 
If he could have transferred to his intellection 
the moving intensity that his childhood had cast 
upon his sense perceptions, he knew that his poetry 
and his thinking could have had a value that he 
was powerless to bring to them now. He saw that 
however intense that childhood's preoccupation 
had made his sensuous thrill, that intensity was 
now incommunicable, and so wasted. 

His childhood had gone all in one direction. It 
had enriched and intensified certain apprehensions 
through the intimacy with which they had been 
woven into the very texture of his spirit; and those 
apprehensions were with him yet, more intimately 
than any other later acquisitions could ever be. 
But they were futile. They were not of the stuff 
of manhood. His manhood had gone, perforce, 
and because it was manhood, all in the other di- 
rection. It had had to begin over. It had had to 
acquire all its substance anew. For the stuff of 
manhood could hardly be the emotional intensity 



1 



Poor Richard 229 

of a perception of blue sky, of autumn browns and 
yellows, of thrilling odors, and of sweet sounds. 
He knew that there was something still childish in 
the dulcet cadences of even the noblest celebra- 
tions of those perceptions for their own sakes — 
often in Wordsworth, sometimes in Keats, and less 
worthily in most of the poetasters of the present. 
There was need for a little more iron in the poet^s 
soul. 

The thing was that the romantic naturalists were 
all for leaving out of the story the one thing that 
was to give the story its point. And he had grown 
up under the shadow of their wings. They were 
all for what was natural; and what they called 
natural was the thing that was spontaneous. His 
own point of rebellion, however, was that the sig- 
nificant thing about life lay in what men had made 
of it. And what men had made of it — accumu- 
lated in the records of what had been nobly thought 
and done in the past — was just what by being so 
charmingly natural and spontaneous, he had so 
far, and for long thereafter, so wholly missed. 

But these things, though he had later set himself 
to acquire them consciously and with untiring in- 
terest, could never, he knew, and in the event never 
did, become bone of his bone. They never became 
of the very texture of his thought, the form of his 
mind, as they must have become before he could 
have been specifically a poet, or, lacking that 
genius, have attained to that richness of conscious- 
ness that lies behind the subtle mastery of the best 
that life has to offer to the heart and to the mind. 
They never became the intimate stuff of his spirit. 



230 A Lover of the Chair 

Not that he would have brought back the era 
that had been so harsh to poor Richard Evelyn. 
That age had had its excesses as evil perhaps as 
his own. He cherished still the positive values of 
his spontaneous freedom. But he could not forget 
the quick sensitiveness of his responses to what- 
ever vague rumors of the human past had filtered 
down to him — from sword and powderhorn, pic- 
tures, old costumes, stories, the talk of elders, the 
atmosphere of the house, to which he had reacted 
with visual presentments with all the humane spirit 
he had. He could not forget that this sensitiveness 
to what was humane might have been fed with 
what was significant as well as with what was in- 
significant, calculated instead of casual, and might 
have been informed instead of left formless. And 
he could not forget that even the school, when it 
came to take over the task, did little to alter the 
way of his mind that his childhood had set him out 
upon, confirming the natural impression of such a 
childhood that from the casualness of play with 
the visual objects around him should arise the 
things of value out of which his maturity should 
be made. 

It was with such thoughts, then, that he came to 
catch, behind the harshness of that age that had 
seemed so hard upon its children and so productive 
of poets, something of its animating spirit. The 
old severity, which had been too stern in its ex- 
cess for that incomparable blossom of the Res- 
toration, had had a heart, though it had had a 
mind also. For it knew that though the child lost 
little of the glamor of childhood no matter what 



Poor Richard 231 

its preoccupations, having the power to color what- 
ever it touched with its own luminous and endear- 
ing atmosphere, the man's thoughts would be for- 
ever more enlightened, more rich, more subtle, if 
the indurating discipline of the child's preoccupa- 
tions had been bent from the first upon the things 
that his maturity would find of the supremest 
value. 

As it was, the illumination that so intensified the 
magic of those rare moments when the light of his 
childhood flashed back upon him never animated 
the substance of his maturer reflections, never gave 
them that inner conviction of reality that breathed 
a spirit into the inanimate world of his sensuous 
perceptions. He had lost something forever. 



II 

THE AWKWARD AGE 

HIS early youth was curious, and yet typical. 
It had none of the serenity of his childhood; 
it was marred by an April suddenness, a March vio- 
lence; it was abrupt, explosive, extravagant. It 
came upon him with strange and disturbing signs. 
In his earlier days, in the simplicity of his outlook, 
his mind for all its occasional harkenings to the 
voice of his spirit had been singularly free from 
any consciousness of itself. Experience and feeling 
had glided into experience and feeling with un- 
questioning calm; and though he had often reacted 
vigorously, like a healthy animal, to the immediate 
push of his surroundings, his consciousness had 
been direct and naive. It had been troubled neither 
with the larger bearings of his problems nor with 
the new and tyrannous stirrings of conscious 
emotion. 

Then suddenly these stirrings came upon him. 
They roiled the clear shallows of his spirit. New 
voices spoke to him inarticulately, and he had no 
experience of how to answer them and no terms 
in which to ask for help. Disconcerting tears 
sprang into his eyes from feelings of which he 
knew the force and the depth, but whose nature 
was strange and sometimes terrifying. 



The Awkward Age 233 

It was a period in which his spirit welled up and 
overflowed. He needed channels and curbs, and 
channels and curbs were just what his typical 
breeding had eschewed. The overflow found no 
driving current to clarify its waters. It stood 
creaming and mantling, stagnant and clogged. 
Twenty Hues of Homer a day — anything hard 
and regular and humane — might have put firm 
ground under his feet. A touch of the birch might 
have taught him that some mental things were as 
damnable as some moral things. But he had no 
Homer and no birch. He mooned, callowly, hours 
on end. 

In other respects the first years of his youth 
were a time endeared to his later humor by the 
pathos of their awkwardness, their flounderings, 
their rebellious sincerities. A sudden disconcerting 
self-consciousness broke in upon him. His boy- 
hood habits were at a loss. Like his voice that 
broke suddenly between bass and childish treble, 
his manner broke between jaunty assurance and 
helpless childish tears. He was restless. He did 
not know how to control his new being. His 
spirit was awkward — all hands and feet. He was 
ashamed. And he disguised his softest and most 
radiant moments in strident noise. There were 
times when he was all activity, filling the house 
with clamor, or, rebelliously disobedient, wander- 
ing from home in forbidden company. At other 
times he spent his hours in the house over books 
that he did not understand, proudly conscious of 
family councils solicitous for his bodily health. He 
picked up strange, harmless oaths and uttered them 



234 A Lover of the Chair 

at calculated moments. He began to launch upon 
the dinner table, not the artless chatter of events, 
but sudden bombs of opinion. His course began 
an uncertain diagonal across the grooves of his 
childhood, and the friction rasped but interested 
him. He was stirred by his rough jolting. His 
new course seemed inexplicably right though he 
could find no defense for it. His impotence and 
irritation when he was put to it to justify his de- 
fiant opinions developed a phrase that came to be, 
in its petulent iteration, characteristic of his whole 
boyhood. ''I protest!'' he would cry, prefacing a 
dictum that seemed to him rebelliously true; and 
when amused elders pointed out the humor of his 
invariable protestation, his spirit cried out from 
stil) greater depths his rebellious "I protest!" 

There was no conscious pathos and no softness 
in his rebellion. It was militant, noisy, crude. It 
was irrational even to his own perception, and not 
of a kind to win understanding from others. But 
it was not morose or brooding. He had over him 
a watchful parental sympathy, and though this was 
personal and patient rather than actively critical 
and corrective, it saved him from morbidity. He 
was never wholly turned in upon himself. And 
there was enough laughter in him and in them to 
keep him healthy. Like his childhood, however, 
his youth was left to its spontaneous courses. And 
when the explosions came that marked the moments 
of his growth he was helpless enough before their 
energy, and bewildered enough in the regions where 
they left him. 

The first of the explosions that marred his youth 



The Awkward Age 235 

struck at him deeply. In his childhood the church 
had been one of the normal unquestioned con- 
ditions of life, perhaps the more that his own grand- 
father, in surplice and bands, had warmed the 
mystery of the weekly service with his kindly face 
and familiar voice. From his earliest years the 
name of God had been on his tongue with the 
simple, frank familiarity of household acquain- 
tance, and accepted with the same simple faith with 
which he had accepted the deeds and dangers of 
unseen ancestors. The weekly service, its constant 
association with his grandfather, the nightly prayer, 
had worn therefore a deep groove in his mind. It 
was but natural that in the sudden expansion of 
his feelings and the mystic deepening of his per- 
ceptions the touch of infinity in the thought of 
God should have stirred him deeply. 

In the humbling immensity of a starry night the 
skies, no longer fiat and one, but many, and near 
and far, flashed on his imagination their immanent 
mystery. They would have done so of their own 
suggestion, but it was there too that in the cos- 
mology of his traditions he placed that other mys- 
tery with whose articulate symbolism his churchly 
associations had made him long familiar. And on 
the azure background beyond the uttermost stars 
his fancy traced the faint entrancing imagery of 
heaven, like evanescent etchings on the blue depths 
of steel. Without deceiving him it was still very 
real, perhaps the more that here the new reach of 
his emotions could play without restraint and his 
new hunger could be richly fed. At night when 
the quiet of the household promised seclusion he 



236 A Lover of the Chair 

would draw his bed silently to the open window 
and lie rapt before the pageantry of the skies, until 
sleep overtook him with its vivid, tyrannous 
pageantry of dreams. 

All this period had its engaging side. The quick- 
ness of his moods, the sudden boyish softness, the 
shame-faced self-consciousness, the undeceptive, 
boisterous disguises, the freedom, the naturalness of 
his awkward, petulant intensity, the sweep of his 
fancy — all these things had for those who watched 
him from without with half-understanding, the 
clear charm that lies in the unspoiled sponta- 
neities of developing life. Even for him, in his duller 
years, though he knew the dangers to which his 
utter freedom had exposed him, its spell quickened 
in him unbidden yearnings that defied his better 
judgment. 

But his judgment weighed more calmly and 
steadily the reaction that followed. The new un- 
conscious, vigorous logic that filled him with quick 
rebellious opinions, wandering restlessly abroad for 
food, fell in some moment of idle reading upon a 
report that there was no God. It pointed out the 
miseries of life, and with quick logic shattered his 
faith in that enveloping goodness that had stood 
for him vaguely as a bulwark against wrong. His 
own moments of personal desolation had never put 
doubts in his mind. Rather they had cast him 
more intimately upon that sympathy which his 
faith created for him. But the objective picture 
of the suffering of others, stirring his own sympathy 
and his will to help, brought to him nothing but 
blame for a God who was all powerful but who still 



The Awkward Age 237 

failed to stir a hand in relief. Even this, however, 
might not have outlasted the fever of his sympathy 
if the writer had not gone on to smile in scientific 
terms at the superstition of a heaven beyond the 
stars. If the deductions were not inevitable from 
the data cited, yet his inexperience was helpless in 
the face of his reason ; and when he again looked at 
the stars it was in anguish, and his fancy found no 
tracery of heaven on the hard blue background of 
space. 

His heart recoiled in terror from his thoughts. 
Looking at the stars he said to himself that there 
was no God. There was no God, he said to himself 
in the long miserere of the Litany. And in saying 
this he seemed to himself to have become a monster. 
Yet he had no power to change at will the report 
of his logic. Every vestige of his passional 
nature — duty, inclination, fear — was arrayed 
against his intelligence, but he had no choice; his 
intelligence was he. His desolation was not as for 
a loss; it was as for a deed of horror unforgivable. 
He was an outcast hungering at the gates; and 
always as he took a step to enter he said as in duty 
bound, "There is no God." And he turned back 
wearily and in despair. His misery was intense. 
He prayed incessantly the short desperate prayer 
for faith. 

In the end old habit and the fervent emphasis of 
his desire battered at his reason and numbed it into 
submission. Before that time came, however, he 
wasted himself in hopeless pain, and created in his 
own life a devastated area that even the passage 
of time could never color or soften or endear. His 



238 A Lover of the Chair 

treasonable intellectual ardor had lived, no doubt, 
because of the intoxication of a newly found power, 
and had died because, when the burst was over and 
the point was understood, there was nothing more 
to do about it. He was instinctively hungering, not 
for intellectual labor, but for the excitement of ex- 
ercise, and he was sufficiently of his time to have 
but little sobering labor to temper the excesses of 
his excitement. He was naturally all for sponta- 
neity and excess. 

He was not done with his acrid atheism. In the 
wasteful vagrancies of his youth he came back to 
it again and again. In the meantime he became 
suddenly subdued and commonplace, as though all 
the ardors of his spirit had gathered themselves for 
a flight, and, defeated, had withdrawn, wearied and 
broken. 

Other preoccupations followed to divert his mind 
to outward things. The family fortunes, never 
great, and not founded on the ardent, straight- 
forward acquisitiveness that characterized the 
normal middle-class prosperity about him, slowly 
declined. Straitened circumstances narrowed 
the range of his growing powers and curiosities so 
that for a long period an apparent stagnation, and 
very real external limitations, rendered his case in- 
distinguishably common. In one respect, however, 
his case was not wholly representative; it did not 
occur to those in charge of these declining fortunes 
that he should abandon what seemed to them the 
normal freedom and leisure of youth and take part 
in the daily toil that sustained the family. 

Cut off from the active pleasures of his growing 



The Awkward Age 239 

associates by successive migrations and successive 
stages of poverty, he turned from the outer world 
to the world of books. In his later memories there 
was a curious duality in the period of his life that 
followed. On the one hand there was the in- 
creasingly dingy world of reality. Cares marrqd 
the faces of those who had made idyllic the old life 
in the house behind the walled garden. There were 
now dark and narrow rooms in place of the sunlit 
brown and orange library and the haunts of his old 
dream people; there was a sordid neighborhood 
whose unlovely life obtruded itself upon his wonted 
seclusion; there were narrow unclean streets that 
must be traversed daily where glaring billboards 
took the place of lawns. On the other hand there 
was oblivion from all this searing ugliness in a 
slowly opening world of romance, whose bright 
colors and gleaming pageantry, whose unreined 
freedom and intensity of emotion gave him, now in 
his period of expanding powers, all that he had to 
feed upon. It was an opiate whose dreams rapt 
him away from reality into a world that by em- 
phasis, by love, by every appeal to his gentler 
tastes, became more real for him than reality itself. 
Though no doubt this opiate saved him from 
many of the influences of the unlovely life into 
which he had fallen, and guarded him from re- 
actions that might have been, if more healthily 
active, at the same time more of the kind of that 
sordid life itself, yet it had the dangers of an 
opiate — it was an evasion, not a correction, and it 
fastened itself upon his habits seductively, pointing 
no way out except through deeper and deeper 



240 A Lover of the Chair 

draughts of its own poison. He fed uncritically 
upon whatever came in his way. That was the 
inevitable penalty and privilege of youth. But 
though he had enough guidance to keep him free 
from actual coarseness, he was left to run into the 
more dangerous shallows of vulgarity. If his taste 
was ever to improve it must be by way of wading 
through a soft bog that was more likely to sink him 
altogether. 

In the event he carried some of the stains with 
him for the rest of his life. At least he never re- 
covered wholly from the delay. When in the course 
of time his mind had settled into the stability of 
rational judgment and he could discriminate and 
guide himself, he was by that very fact beyond the 
plastic moment when the unconscious impinge- 
ments of his attention could still weave the native 
texture of his mind. By that time its warp was 
already set and its pattern sketched. 

As it was, in the bright monotony of the read- 
ings of those years he fell upon that last word of 
excess, Les Miserables, more pernicious than the 
inanities of his earlier indulgence because it was 
the product of genius. Thereafter his world of 
romance was lifted into a still higher aloofness from 
the world about him. In this state he remained for 
a year or two, reading further but often coming 
back to its pages more deeply thrilled by its repe- 
tition than by the paler though newer reflections of 
its spirit from other surfaces. It was consecrated 
by a solemnity that nothing could surpass, neither 
in heaven nor on earth. What his notion of Hfe 
was growing to be, under this influence, he could 



The Awkward Age 241 

not have told so well as he could have told a few 
years before in his brief moments of rational re- 
volt. His mind was lulled to sleep. He had no 
humor, no iron in his soul. 

And yet, underneath, the suppressed elements of 
his more rational nature were accruing. The oc- 
casion of their release was a happy one. Perhaps 
nothing could have better served to bridge the wide 
gap between the portentous solemnity of his 
Miserables years and the more balanced years that 
followed. He had by some chance never been to 
the play. The isolation of his native town, the 
principle of simplicity in his early breeding, the 
enforced simplicity of his later years had all made 
against it. But rumors of its enchantments had 
reached him, especially in that long period in which 
he was living on enchantments, and the opportunity 
when it came inevitably drew him. 

No doubt it was a poor enough affair. It was 
an open air performance and the weather came off 
cold. The play was As You Like It. He came to 
it from among his sordid streets in the August 
twilight, and hung about the still closed entrance 
impatient of delay yet excited by every noise and 
occurrence that seemed part of the awaited event. 
He paced, eager and shivering and alone, before 
the gate, listening to voices behind the ticket 
window, watching the muffled figures that rolled up 
in carriages and disappeared within. He entered 
at last with a thin trickle of spectators, and sat 
with them under the trees in a little shivering group 
before the rustic stage. Beyond that he had no 
further recollection of them or of their world. 



242 A Lover of the Chair 

They no longer existed around him. He was trans- 
lated; he was drunk with a vision of a world that 
was new and luminous. There was no illusion here as 
he had known illusion in his romances. Here was 
reality before him to hate, to pity, and to love. 
And he hated, he pitied, and he loved it. 

On the chair beneath the trees sat his thin body, 
its legs twisted about the legs of the chair, its hands 
deep in pockets, and its collar shiveringly turned 
up. But he did not know it. His heart was in the 
Forest of Arden. It was a real world of feeUng 
for him, and where yet a magic and nimble wit, 
striking in him a quick spark of response, clarified 
the turgid flood of his emotion. There was here 
something new and something stirring. His young 
heart thrilled with the sudden perceptions of his 
mind. Though he seemed not to have lost in sym- 
pathy, nor to have lost his own part in the magic 
events, yet he found himself suddenly aloof, seeing 
through and through the hearts and minds before 
him. Clear and bright colors fell upon the moving 
scene; he was transposed; a new lightness of heart 
seized him. Rosalind, Touchstone, Jacques — 
they were beings of another order into which he 
had but now been born. And when the epilogue 
was spoken, and the bright figures had disappeared 
into the dark depths of the forest, he sat still and 
expectant; for him that world had not gone out. 
Even when a rough hand touched his shoulder and 
turned him away, he obeyed mechanically, not 
seeing that the others were gone and he was alone. 
He walked home through the dark streets in an 
airy cloud, and his feet did not touch the hard 
stones. 



The Awkward Age 243 

Days passed before he again felt the earth, and 
he welcomed the nights when he could lie on his 
pillow and live again without interruption in the 
magic world of his new discovery. Something had 
taken place in his mind — something that turned 
him away from the opacity and truculence of 
Victor Hugo. Light and translucent, the new world 
stimulated him as the old world had lulled him to 
sleep. He lost something of his old helplessness in 
the presence of feeling. His mind was pricked into 
alertness, and in his new responses he was intoxi- 
cated with a new joy. At home in a dark attic, in 
a heap of lumber, he found, relic of more pros- 
perous days, a pile of illustrated folios of Shakes- 
peare, and into these he plunged with eagerness. 
There was much that he did not understand, but 
he read none the less avidly, with now and then a 
flash of delight that only later he knew to be the 
thrill of a responsive mind to the stimulus of wit, 
the leap of a perception, the thrust of an intuition. 
He found once more, after a dull lapse, the power 
to stand aloof above his feelings. He could laugh 
again, catching the irony of his new master. In 
time, to be sure, the first brightness of his new 
outlook faded, but it never so wholly dulled as had 
his early religious revolt. It had more food to sus- 
tain itself with. All Shakespeare lay before him, 
and little by little he plowed forward. Then he 
found Scott; and Scott lasted him till he was wholly 
saved. 

But though he read his new authors, and ex- 
ercised with them a clearer, fuller faculty than with 
the old, he had not essentially changed. They were 



244 ^ Lover of the Chair 

still for him an opiate, an escape from his sordid 
world. He was still a passive reader. If his mind 
was active it was only when the page was open 
before him, and only under the stimulus of de- 
light. It was only receptive. He was true to the 
beginnings of his training, and though his tastes 
were year by year dedicating him to a preference 
for what had at one time been called the scholarly 
life — a hfe guided by a love of letters — his 
mental habits were not with equal steps being 
stiffened by discipline to the rigors of that pur- 
suit — not even being informed that it had rigors 
to be trained for. He was on his way to add one 
more to that modern army of vagabonds who 
wander picturesquely over the broad highway of 
letters, revealing their soul's adventures with a 
mountebank's shameless facility, and accorded a 
happy parasitic living by a public eager to be 
amused and flattered. 

There was in him, however, something that saved 
him from such a fate in the end, though he never 
wholly recovered from the long years of passivity. 
It was high time. He was nearing the end of his 
early youth. When youth was past he might, it 
was true, add to his knowledge, but the cast of his 
mind would be set, and the subtle mode of his 
thought and the play of his spirit would be forever 
determined. Shakespeare and Scott had done 
something real for him, joining to their sentiment 
a touch of rational perception, and giving him a 
thirst for further indulgence in his growingly con- 
scious faculty. 

They were not wholly gleaned when he fell upon 



The Awkward Age 245 

an old volume of Emerson. It was one of the 
ironies of his haphazard development that it should 
have been a volume of the vaguely general essays 
instead of the Representative Men, and it diffused 
his thoughts skyward into the rarefied upper alti- 
tudes, rather than laterally over the tangible sur- 
face of history. The one would have held him as 
well as the other, for it was the play of perception 
that stimulated him, and his attention might have 
been brought to more and ever widening human 
interests. The old volume, however, brought him 
to something that he had not experienced since the 
brief candle of his religious revolt had guttered 
out. It brought him actively to exercise his own 
intelligence. Like St. Francis in the legend, when 
he came upon a thought that struck an answering 
spark in him he would close the book and read no 
more, but sit and brood upon the soaring flight of 
the idea. His reflections were vague, no doubt, 
diffuse stellar fancies, mystic outreachings into the 
unknowable, but they had the virtue of being ac- 
tive, and they felt the restriction of needing to 
seem rational and explanatory. 

The accident that brought about this activity 
was fortuitous enough, and wasteful enough. It 
was the chance of a sudden storm that found him 
the Emerson in an ancient chest of scraps. It sent 
him back in senseless repetition of much of the 
first period of his adolescence when he had thrilled 
so tremulously at the impingement of beauty in 
the world around him. But it added something 
that to his later reflections he knew to be the 
determinant of his later bent. In seeming to give 



246 A Lover of the Chair 

an explanation, however vague, of an existence of 
whose mystery he was growingly conscious, his 
winged fancies struck in him a new and strong 
gratification. 

His new experiences were extravagant. His un- 
regulated ardor went its own course. Vaguely but 
ardently he set out in search of explanations. With 
his battered Emerson in his pocket, and with a 
lightness of heart and keenness of interest that had 
known no intermission since his starry night in the 
Forest of Arden, he wandered abroad into the pied 
meadows of a world of romantic perceptions. From 
what ancient springs of kinship with the earth, and 
what heritage of natural philosophy in the depths 
of his common nature his sudden lore sprang he 
could not have told. But his Emerson struck in 
him immediate responses of acquiescence and 
understanding as of unguessed memories of ancient 
revelation. Romanticism, he knew in a later 
period when he had had the advantages of a com- 
pleter aloofness and the keener irony of maturity, 
was but the natural philosophy of adolescence. 
But at the time, with the joy of adventure, he took 
it for humane truth. And when he could he left 
the contradictory coil and trouble of the .town, and 
hunted for it in the acquiescence of the woods 
beyond. 

He felt himself vibrant there with intense and 
pleasurable sensations — subtle distinctions of 
greens on the tangled floor, sorrel and wort, the 
leaf of the violet and the dog-tooth lily; the varied 
patterns of branches spread against the sky, the 
dense texture of foliage where the sun struck full 



The Awkward Age 247 

upon distant trees. In restful silences he heard 
the whispering growth of the grass, the feathery 
fall of limp leaves, the movement of unseen insects; 
he caught the faint sweet odor of the decaying sod, 
and felt the rising coolness of the ground on his 
outstretched hand. He seemed to himself to be a 
part of the consciousness in which nature realized 
her own existence. 

Such romantic indulgences were natural enough 
to his youth, though for him they were a part of 
the ground he had covered years before. They 
would have been sufficiently empty, however, if an 
active mind in him had not, at this second oc- 
currence, set to work upon a troubling observation 
that recurred again and again to baffle him. A 
sharp separateness forever stood between his own 
consciousness and the moving spirit of the outer 
world. He rebelled. He rebelled perhaps the more 
passionately that this disturbing sense came upon 
him most strongly at moments when his identity 
with that world seemed to him most yearningly to 
be desired and most nearly consummated — in 
moments when the sight or sound or scent of touch- 
ing loveliness moved him to the depths of his soul. 
In his impotence, at such supreme moments, to 
push past the veil, he recognized the undertone of 
sadness that forever haunts the presence of beauty. 
He failed then, signally enough, to recognize the 
incommensurable duality between his innermost 
consciousness on the one hand, and even the deepest 
reaches of his senses on the other. But he was 
aware of his own failure to attain that identity to 
which in moments of emotion he seemed to come 



248 A Lover of the Chair 

so near. And he tried to build a cosmology that 
would bridge the gulf. 

It was pleasurably consistent as he made it — 
this cosmology. It brought the wide compass of 
his observations and his dreams into positions in 
which they could all be viewed in one set of re- 
lationships. And if his experience of life was meager, 
and he distinguished imperfectly between the con- 
sistently logical and the empirically real, he at 
least was doing with his data what was asked of 
him in the rules. And his product was in kind, if 
not in depth, like that of his master. His immor- 
tality of development, and his conception of evil 
as but milestones on the endless journey to per- 
fection, were as logical as the logic of desire ever is. 

For the first time in his life, now that he had 
stepped beyond the companionship of his authors, 
he felt the need of someone to share his dreams. 
There seemed a kind of futility in their isolation 
in his own mind. He was not long in finding others 
of the same bent, products of the same age and the 
same youthfulness. Together they strayed afield, 
and sitting on some bank sang, a little consciously, 
but earnestly and with justifying heartiness, their 
prose eclogues of nature and immortality, ridicu- 
lous and divine. Or on long winter evenings within 
doors they soared into an empyrean where after 
the end of this life's possibilities they were again 
to take up their thrilling journey. 

How long this enthusiasm would have lasted he 
had some indications from the cooling subsidence of 
their later meetings. It was not from his sense 
that the truth of these dreams had faded, but that 



The Awkward Age 249 

in the end the conferences grew thin with the ex- 
haustion of matter. They had reached the 
end of their tether, and having estabUshed a vast 
cosmos they found little left to do but live their 
lives in the light of its setded relations. But this 
life itself was the dull life of poverty, narrowed to 
an earthly routine, and his mind was active, and 
hungry for stuff to feed upon. After his seductive 
taste of ambrosia he was restive under an earthly 
dietary. He had drunken of a divine nectar and 
the waters of the kitchen tap were flat in his mouth. 
He began to suffer under the romantic irony. 

He was saved from a despondent reaction, how- 
ever, by a circumstance to which his unballasted 
condition had made him peculiarly liable. Before 
the meetings had become quite graveled for matter 
they were heard of by an elder of active intelli- 
gence, who had wind of their speculative activity 
and found it sufficiently interesting to attract his 
S5niipathy and curiosity. He made occasion to meet 
them in his library, and with the spell of his own 
intelligence and in the seductive atmosphere of books 
and learning which the young vagrant breathed 
again in grateful remembrance, he released the 
checks of a new explosion. Whether by virtue of 
an acutely planned attack, or by virtue of a pregnant 
state of mind in the youth, it was accomplished with 
the sureness and precision of time as the clock moved 
from evening to the small hours of a summer's 
dawn. The vast, complex flower of a new concep- 
tion grew visibly in his mind, unfolding between 
sunset and sunrise. 

In all his readings he had come upon little or 



250 A Lover of the Chair 

nothing to put him in touch with the dominant 
thought of his own day. Science was a word among 
other words, with no more quickening Hfe for him 
than many another ; and evolution had never stirred 
in him even an echo of the cry that was ringing in 
the world about him. Whether it could ever have 
effected in him the intoxication of that night if he 
had plodded to it through years of slow development 
is doubtful. As it was, suddenly but systematically 
unfolded before him, petal by petal with a thousand 
deft touches as the hours flashed by him unheeded, 
it made him drunk. He saw suddenly the vast cos- 
mology of his romantic speculations melt away into 
the vague azure unknown beyond the skies. And 
the bright apex of his system, that had shone there 
so vividly, its rays diverging downward upon all 
that he knew and all that he could ever know, he 
saw now to be but an ignis fatuus of his own mind. 
There was a sharp pain in his heart, an hour of 
poignant, clinging regret; and then the new light 
flooded in upon him and dazzled him. 

He saw now that men themselves stood by the 
apex of light, and that all the illumination there was 
in the dark world diverged outward from men's 
minds till it was extinguished at the vague frontiers 
of empirical knowledge. He saw, suddenly revealed 
in the magic of a word, the slow growth, through 
the ages of the past, of nebulae, of worlds, of or- 
ganic life, of intelligence, of civilization. In man 
he saw the growth of all the knowledge there was, 
groping its way through the humble senses to wider 
and wider acquaintance with the knowable, till men 
stood in humility before the vast, acknowledged un- 



The Awkward Age 251 

known. Such were the Spencer ian terms of his new 
revelation. 

The vision crashed sensibly through his brain, 
and dazzled him with a blinding light. He groped 
his way home, unconscious of his companions, in a 
luminous halo. Echoes of the evening were bidding 
him take his place in the devoted army of martyrs 
who strove up the misty mountains of knowledge, 
humbly hopeful of a moment's fitful view of higher 
peaks beyond, and humbly grateful if in the end, 
weary and broken, they might die clasping to their 
breasts a feather fallen from the wings of truth. 
Whether he slept he could not tell. His dreams and 
his waking thoughts were alike. And though he 
arose next day and went through the routine of his 
old habits, the light still dazzled him, glowing 
brightly in the periphery of his vision. 

Slowly the personal significance of his counter- 
conversion sank in upon his mind. He gave up his 
Christianity — even the vague pantheism into which 
it had latterly grown. But he had no regrets. He 
gave over the aesthetic contemplation of his late cos- 
mology for a militant atheism that for the moment 
saw no humor in his scoffing ironies, so soon had he 
forgotten the gentler faith. He visited churches to 
witness the weak foibles of kneeling believers. He 
wrangled with his betters, and came off with the 
easy victory of the scoffer. He abandoned his old 
reading with a sudden sense that it was archaic, 
based on an old and naive conception of men and 
Providence. And he took up with current writers 
whose daring pleased his strident revolt. In a word 
he went through in pathetic miniature the spiritual 



252 A Lover of the Chair 

history of the half century that was getting on to 
its last decade. 

There was here, without doubt, some gain for 
him. He had lost his isolation. He no longer 
climbed into his ivory tower, but stalked up and 
down the highway with his bat upon his neck, ready 
for adventure — a knight errant in spirited defiance 
of the dragon superstition. He seemed to have 
found the formula of life. The word evolution 
seemed to flash upon him the past foreshortened 
into a single perspective behind him, and the future 
into a single perspective before him. It was all 
very simple. 

In time, however, he found it fraught with more 
difficulties than seemed reasonable to his moments 
of contemplation. He found in himself a multitude 
of ignorances that shamed him. His mere enthu- 
siasm was not enough to convert others whose eyes 
were set on other vistas. He needed more knowl- 
edge. And he found in himself, too, as months went 
on and he came to old roads where his feet had 
often trod, traitorous sympathies that made him 
hesitate. Old faiths, old feelings, old enthusiasms, 
that had lain asleep in his mind awoke at discon- 
certing moments and pleaded their claims with him. 
They pleaded the more effectively when he came 
one day upon a persuasive voice that touched, with 
perhaps a questionable but no less disconcerting 
logic, a foible in his latest militancy. This voice 
echoed the doubt that all beliefs were but the 
products of the passional nature. And when he 
examined his own new belief, conscious of his own 
ignorance, he found that for himself, whatever the 



The Awkward Age 253 

general truth or falsity of the doctrine, the doubt 
was justified. His last belief, like its predecessor, 
had been won by his enthusiasm. It was not built 
upon that empirical knowledge that it postulated as 
the one thing worthy of respect. Whether he was 
in any worse case, philosophically speaking, than the 
great prophets of that movement he did not inquire. 
For his own part he was no better in relation to his 
new scientific cosmology than to his older romantic 
one. He had accepted the one, as he had accepted 
the other, from a passionate need to orientate him- 
self. He was logical in his bent. But now his logic 
confuted him. 

He awakened to a longing for more knowledge 
and more guidance. His friend, the mentor of his 
last conversion, urged him toward science. But 
when he saw before him the vista of years spent in 
minute search for the details of physical fact, some- 
thing within him revolted. He began to see dimly 
that science itself, for all its prophets, did not solve 
the problem he was interested in. After all, science 
was only a body of human knowledge. And though 
men should in time know infinitely more than they 
knew now, there would still be the humane problem 
of how they should use their knowledge. Not in 
clear terms, but gropingly, he apprehended that the 
central human problem was the problem of the eli- 
gible life, and that at its utmost science was but one 
contribution to it. He was interested in that central 
thing in the human universe — humanity itself. 
Only years later did he see how right he had been in 
his young intuition that, for all the room science was 
taking in the world, it was, humanly speaking, but 



2 54 A Lover of the Chair 

the servant, precise and reliable, of the moral part 
of human nature. 

Now, however, he mistrusted his perceptions. 
And his passion for the center not only kept him 
from being contented with a pursuit of the details 
of scientific knowledge, but deprived him of the 
guidance of the best minds around him. He could 
not know then, as he knew years later, the malady 
of which he was sick — that something in his native 
bent and in the accidents of his experience had put 
him out of tune with his time, had given him a 
passion for the general in an age of the particular, 
and for the humane and moral in an age of the 
physical. And his training had given him neither 
the data to satisfy his bent nor the habit of concen- 
tration, of disciplined patience, of systematic pro- 
cedure, that should give substantial body to the ab- 
stractions of his thought. 

And so, without guidance, and vaguely troubled, 
he sank back into his old desultory reading. Even 
his reading, after his disappointments and disillu- 
sionments, had lost something of its old power 
with him. He seemed, in his shallow experience, to 
have plunged into life and to have emerged with a 
sense of its emptiness. But he was still young, and 
at the bottom of his heart there clung a hope that 
refused the doubts of his experience. Somewhere 
there must be a center, and a knowledge of the 
center, and a guidance that could lead him on the 
high path of those longings that so persisted in the 
mysterious depths of his spirit. 



Ill 

PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA 

THEY were undergraduates, and their experi- 
ence was that they did not fit, that they were 
not taken care of. The significance of their case 
lay in the fact that they were, as distinguished from 
others who seemed to fit so well and to be so well 
cared for, just those for whom that care might have 
been supposed to be calculated. As for them, to 
begin with they were willing enough to fit, anxious 
enough to be taken care of. What else could have 
been the content of the thrill of one of them, who 
might have been any one of them so typical was he 
of the rest, as he first neared the college campus 
and caught the gleam of roofs above its treetops? 

It was late September, and cold, and a northeast 
wind pushed the drippings of his umbrella against 
his face. The wide, empty suburban streets were 
washed clean, and gleamed darkly under the gray 
sky. Other figures passed him now and again, mere 
wind-whipped vehicles for umbrellas — rapt, self- 
centered. He too was rapt, but outwardly, and he 
stood minute after minute unable, or unwilling, to 
break the spell that bound him. Gleaming gray 
sky, gleaming gray streets, the rain drifting heavily 
southward; before him the drenched green of the 
campus and the solid red of aspiring roofs — there 



256 A Lover of the Chair 

they were before him, and there was he — face to 
face, the seeker and the sought. There was no 
other content to the spell, no other content in the 
seeker's mind. While it lasted there was for him no 
beyond. It was a supreme moment. To move 
would have been to take a step into the future, to 
begin a new and uncertain course toward an uncon- 
ceived goal. To stand still was to prolong the mo- 
ment of ultimate achievement. No doubt to turn 
back now would have been to cancel the validity of 
the moment — so much of futurity lay in the spell 
that held him — but the value of the moment lay 
in its perfect culmination of the past. It was the 
moment itself, not the future consequences of it, 
that brought fulfillment to the yearnings and hopes 
that had been his for so long. They were full to the 
brim in his sense that at last he had come to college. 
The time came when the moment could hold no 
more; and when he finally moved from the spot it 
was a movement into the future. That he moved 
forward was a confession of faith, a confession of 
his anxiety to be taken care of. Above everything 
else he needed to be taken care of, for he had re- 
sponded, with an innocence that made his abandon 
dangerous, to many of the subtle whisperings of the 
time spirit, and he now stood at the gate of his 
college far more really adrift than he had seemed 
even in the whim of his fanciful musings. For his 
time had fallen at the end of the century, and he 
was sensitive enough to its spirit to have registered 
in his own soul many of its sweeping negations. If 
he had had the momentum of strong family tradition 
he might have rounded this headland witii its cross 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 257 

currents and shifting gusts, and caught the breeze 
again within the haven of the college. But he was 
average American enough to have inherited no cul- 
tural traditions that could carry him here. At home 
on the paternal shelves he had seen from childhood 
respectable ranks of books, but the Liddell and 
Scott, and the Xenophon there, more worn of covers 
than of contents, had as yet come to mean no more 
to him than long ago had meant the A-ANA, 
ANA-ATH, ATH-BOI of the Britannica that he 
had learnt from long gazing before he had mastered 
his school primer. As for the rest it was significant 
of the vagueness of the family tradition that Shake- 
speare and Hugo and Sir Walter were left to span 
the gap between Xenophon and a battered volume 
of Emerson. 

There was, however, a Xenophon, and perhaps 
still enough of what had brought it there to have 
kept him from filling out his notion of ''education" 
wholly at the suggestion of the time spirit. He was, 
none the less, susceptible enough to have been 
thrilled with the spell of the word itself without 
reference to its content. It was an open sesame, 
the more powerful that its possibilities were so 
hidden. But if it lacked substance it was rich in a 
peculiar connotation that had grown out of the life 
that had fallen to his lot — a life of poverty and 
family failure that had found its consolation in an 
escape, more or less perfect, though doubtless tinged 
with the futility of self-deception, into the limbo of 
the imagination. Poverty and failure had drawn 
him into an isolation that had left him no alternative 
but books; and books, indiscriminately devoured, 



258 A Lover of the Chair 

had led his escape through bright ways so remote 
as to deepen the sordidness of that world that had 
thrust him aside. On the one hand had been toil 
that brought no rewards, and material anxieties that 
were none the less real that the stakes were so 
pitiably small; on the other a spacious region in 
which was set free in him every yearning of affection, 
every ardor of will, every energy of imagination, 
that the real world so effectively thwarted. Latterly 
too, as the thought of college had grown into the 
hope of a permanent and material escape, the real 
world and its toil had sunk to the status of a mere 
means. What wonder that the real world had grown 
dim, or that that other world, animated for him at 
least by every natural exercise of his spirit, had 
grown more humanly real? 

If in this plight he had built up for the word a 
connotation that had for him no content of definite 
meaning, he had at least this advantage from his 
vagueness — that he had not filled it with a meaning 
definitely false. However much he shared with 
others of his time the idea that education meant a 
way out J the way out for him had come to be by 
the gate of the spirit, never as with others by way 
of that material world that had grown so dim to 
him. If he had, by the failure of family tradition, 
no clear sense of the road that would take him into 
the region of the spirit, he at least had no tempta- 
tion to follow those clearly marked as leading some- 
where else. That he had no clear sense of his own 
road, however, was not a matter to daunt him now, 
for his faith was unshaken in the willingness and 
competence to guide him of those who had that 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 259 

guidance in trust. Thus much of definite content 
had come to him in the word "college" — perhaps 
from the battered Emerson — that its very reason 
for being was that it stood in the midst of the tur- 
moil of material life to guide its voluntary entrants 
into the life of the spirit. So he had gone, when the 
opportunity came, to a college that had as yet few 
temptations for those whose chosen way out lay 
through the acquisitive vocations, and he found him- 
self now at last on the very threshold of that new 
life. 

In another respect, however, he was not so free 
from the spell of the time spirit; and if he had re- 
frained from filling the word "education" with a 
worldly content by escaping the spell in one of its 
aspects, he had emptied it of a possible spiritual 
content by falling under the spell in another. Re- 
ligion had for him, as for his whole generation, 
passed into quiescence. It was, perhaps, in his con- 
sciousness of the loss rather than in the loss itself 
that his case was in any way notable. The spell was 
general enough ; to know that you were under it was 
the rare feat. No doubt his family tradition was 
operative here, for there had been ministers of the 
church so continuously in the known history of the 
family as at one time to have created the surmise 
that he might inherit the ministry together with the 
churchly name that had come to him from his ma- 
ternal grandfather. He was, as a consequence, sen- 
sitively aware of the passing of the religious spirit. 
Others there undoubtedly were to whom religion had 
always been vague or merely formal, and for whom 
the vast inheritance of organization, of institution, 



2 6o A Lover of the Chair 

and more effectively of vocabulary and childhood 
association, still sufficed to give them all the religion 
of which they had ever been aware. To him, how- 
ever, came the sharp consciousness of the passing 
of that spirit both from his own outlook upon Hfe 
and from that of the generality about him. It had 
come first, this realization, with a struggle in which 
it was thrust aside and apparently stifled. But the 
struggle had not been without its fruits in an ulti- 
mate and shocking counter-conversion that had car- 
ried him, until its force was expended, into the 
militant ranks of the opposition. That he had be- 
fore long retired from the fight was due, as he him- 
self came to realize, to that persistent habit of mind 
which in secular matters so closely allied his hopes 
and ambitions to things of the spirit. But however 
time had mollified the militant combativeness of his 
rationalism, he never again lost his rational point of 
view. 

For him, therefore, whose vague notion of edu- 
cation was at the other extreme from the practical, 
and whose religion had weakened and died, and 
whose traditions were so at a loss beyond the pale 
of vocation and religion, the situation would have 
seemed dire had he not in his youth and inexperience 
put so implicit a faith in the identity of the college 
with that secular inner life that had become so real 
to him. What wonder, therefore, as he stood on 
the threshold filled with a faith so far more in- 
spiring than knowledge, that the moment was one 
of supreme consummation! The uncertainty that 
had oppressed the hopes of the immediate past and 
weighted with doubt the only motives that had en- 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 261 

nobled it, at last had a refutation too dramatic, too 
tangibly set forth in the event itself, to let it be any- 
thing less than supreme. If an enticing sun had 
made, at this first moment, the view before him the 
common visual property of other passers, or had 
lured thither the sophisticated habitues to whom it 
was as an old story, loved but unheeded, the moment 
might have been a less perfect dramatization of the 
event in his own mind. But as it was, the very 
solitude of his possession — fit cUmax of the solitude 
of his hopes — constituted its dramatic fitness. It 
was of a piece with what had gone before. Hence- 
forth, no doubt, he would share it with others; now, 
cleared of extraneous detail, green and gray and 
red, against the ominously gleaming gray of sky 
and rain-swept streets, it was there for him. It 
was, until the moment overflowed, his alone. 

So innocent a faith he had that he would be taken 
care of, and so ignorant was he of what that care 
should be, that it was not until he found himself, 
a year later, at the same spot, that the beginnings of 
doubt assailed him. What — he came to ask in the 
shock of that vivified memory — was it all making 
for, this diversity? For he still clung to his vision 
of the inner life, and to the hope, not yet dulled, but 
not yet confirmed, that the college might solidify 
his fluid sense that there was something there to 
build up. But he saw now that though he had done 
well all that had been asked of him, and lent himself 
eagerly to the unrelated tasks that had come one at 
a time to his hand, he was still as vague, as to end 
and means, in his sophomoric sophistication, as he 
had been in his pathetic freshman ardor. 



262 A Lover of the Chair 

His sophomoric confidence, however, was not 
proof against the uncertainties of the situation. The 
prodigious array of ^'courses" which in printed 
schedule bulged his pocket served only to heighten 
the feebleness of the hope that something would 
emerge to which his separate tasks were contrib- 
uting. That nothing had emerged he was fully 
aware, but in his sophomoric contempt he could 
have forgiven his freshman futility if he could have 
felt a trust that the courses he was now to choose 
would even dimly make for a satisfaction of the 
longings that still dogged him. He knew that if he 
had wanted to enter the law, or medicine, or en- 
gineering, or any of those professions that seemed 
to him but the intensification of that real world 
which he wanted so to rise above, he could have 
found schools to guide him with advice — advice 
which he might not have understood but which none 
the less he would have obeyed with the same faith 
that had been so insufficiently fed by the college he 
had chosen. Not that he had even now a clear 
sense of what perplexed him; he only knew that he 
might have made his choice from that array in the 
bulging schedule less blindly if he had had even a 
dim feeling for some structure to which his choice 
was to contribute. He felt the gnawing discontent 
of aimlessness. 

His subsequent selections, far from quieting this 
unrest, only served to heighten it. For he had gone 
to the kindly dean with longings too inarticulate in 
his own mind to be worded in the bustling publicity 
of the ' 'office," and within the crowded minutes his 
numbered ticket allotted him. In the hour of wait- 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 263 

ing in line he attained in the presence of those 
others to a sense of the official impersonality of even 
his own affairs. The mechanism of this collegiate 
machine loomed before him so deper'sonalized as to 
make an emotional appeal a mere impertinence. In 
elaborating itself for the personal service of the in- 
dividual youth whom it hoped to enrich in the end 
with a personality, it seemed somehow to have 
attained to an entity to which the youth himself be- 
came merely provender. Who was he, in response 
to the tonsorial ''next" that summoned him into the 
presence, however kindly, of the clerical dean, — 
who was he, to interrupt the regularity of that busi- 
nesslike procession with a passionate appeal for a 
philosophy of life! And if the dean found no fault 
with the casual choice marked down on the busi- 
nesslike card before him, how was he to know how 
casual, how blind, that choice had been? He too 
was but a servant of that machine, not chosen to 
impart to each successive entrant in his morning's 
work a philosophic outlook. 

But for our youth, the sense that he had com- 
mitted himself for months to come, for a precious 
fraction of the whole time his college was to do so 
much for him in, to a choice that had been so casual, 
so blind, heightened the unrest that the retrospect 
of his first year had already stirred in him. That 
the separate studies themselves were unable to help 
him he was by now dimly aware. They fell apart 
one from another; they refused to cohere. In- 
ternally each was self-sufficient enough, carefully 
labeled, and rounded out by an examination; but 
the examination might be the valedictory to all the 



264 A Lover of the Chair 

knowledge and wisdom the course contained. After 
the valedictory each might be forgotten. The whole 
that was to be attained was not a structure; it was 
not even an accumulation; it was only a book- 
keeper's record of "having had" successively, for a 
moment each, a sufficient number of parts. Our un- 
happy youth was as yet, however, unaware of the 
more general case. That the kindly dean of the 
college — the college that existed only to guide men 
to the hfe of the spirit — had help for others, but 
had none for those whose generous desire was to 
enter that life, had not as yet stirred in him the 
bitter smile which before the end came to be his 
habitual response to all laudations of the college. 
He could only feel the baffling pain of not having 
got what he could not have defined. 

If, however, discontent at his displacement cut 
him off from associations that arise from community 
of work and enthusiasms, he fell heir to others tra- 
ditionally more prolific of ardent friendship — those 
that arise through community of disaffection. In 
the emptiness of his life he had clung to what had 
given him his first feeling for the distinction between 
the haphazard life around him and the more stable 
life of the spirit. He still read in his old objectless, 
unguided, desultory way, in the literature of his own 
tongue, and had insensibly drifted into the elaborate 
department of his college that concerned itself with 
that literature. And there it was that he fell in 
with others whose tempers and hopes and experi- 
ences and disappointments were so like his own 
that their mutual sympathy was spontaneous and 
lasting. That their association was so lasting was 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 265 

due, as they came to realize, to the circumstance 
that they remained to the end so obstinately un- 
digested a particle in the inwards of their college. 

In one sense they were happier than most of their 
fellows — in the way of friendship — and that 
atoned for much. They went to fetes, and laughed 
with their acquaintances, sang and smoked, and were 
happy on the surface — even below the surface, in 
the possession of that friendship that was the most 
permanant thing that came to them from their col- 
legiate years. There was, no doubt, as much ac- 
cident in their first meeting as usually goes to the 
happy or unhappy incidents of life; but they came 
to feel a kind of beneficent fatality in the circum- 
stance that seemed to rescue them so consciously 
from the futility of the college itself. There were 
three or four or five of them, with the dubious ad- 
vantage of a community of poverty. But they had 
other genuine advantages; one of them had a talent 
for friendship, another for trenchant analysis and 
criticism, another for happy irony, and another for 
sensitive appreciation. So happy a combination of 
qualities — and even their poverty might be called 
happy in isolating them and keeping them from 
eking out the emptiness of their college life with 
purchasable gayeties — such a happy combination 
made their intimate life incomparably rich. 

It was a life of daily association, with a routine 
of habit and custom that kept it from morbidity. 
There were long Saturdays that took them, week 
after week, the rounds of the second-hand book- 
shops, picking up here and there what their meager 
purses could afford of old writers whom they had 



2 66 A Lover of the Chair 

come, in their evenings of reading, to love as much 
for their present association as for their intrinsic 
worth. There were dingy cafes, where the waiters 
came to know their favorite dishes and comment on 
their occasional absences, and where they spent long 
mealtimes bandying passages from their day's finds, 
and munching those unbelievable pastries called 
Bismarcks. There was the impossibly remote top 
gallery at the symphony concert, where they found 
themselves, for the moment, landed on the coast of 
an alluring Bohemia, urban neighbor of Arcadia. 
There were, in defiance of to-morrow's lessons, long 
evenings of reading and Broseley's churchwardens, 
and midnights of wildest metaphysics when even 
the dormitory lay in silence; and late strolls on the 
lake shore where the glare of distant iron mills 
dimmed the stars and cast a ghostly light on the 
breakers that roared at their feet. 

Through it all ran the stirrings of generous friend- 
ship, which had for a time at least the virtue of 
being enough. Even long afterwards, so whole was 
the sufficiency of this aspect of their lives in spite of 
the haunting misery of their more far-seeing mo- 
ments, that one of them could write, with perhaps 
no more enlargement than usually goes to the lauda 
temporis acti, truer to the revery no doubt than to 
the life itself, a reminiscent epistle that might have 
been inspired by that very ballad of Thackeray's 
from which they learned of the Latakia that became 
their favorite weed — 

Dear Marsden: In the days of yore 
When we, three lusty peers or four, 
Or sometimes five, 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 267 

Flourished on nought, and ate and slept 
The better for 't, and grew adept 
At sophomoric talk that kept 
Our souls alive, 

We little thought we'd come to praise 
Those fine Elizabethan days 

Of poverty. 
Now that we've come to man's estate, 
With widening parts and stiffening gait, 
Would we not brook again that fate 

With charity, 

If we could have those days again, — 
The eager soul, the ready pen. 

The easy jest. 
The careless strut, the merry eye, 
A temper calm, a spirit high, 
A ceaseless curiosity 

And interest? 

Oh, once again to enjoy that riot. 
That reckless Rabelaisian diet, 

Bismarck and salad! 
Those high siestas after tea. 
With briar, cob, or Broseley, 
And dream- compelling Latakie 

Of Thackeray's ballad! 

Once more at Ferris's to dine 

Where spirits high compensed for wine 

And luxury! 
Thence to the orchestra in time 
To accomplish swift that torrid climb, 
And hear old Mozart, his sublime 

Sweet symphony! 



2 68 A Lover of the Chair 

Do you recall how by your fire 

We read — oh, land of heart's desire! — 

Old Conrad's "Youth"? 
Rare Harlow, Wendhall, Palinson, 
Shall we e'er meet in Muir again 
To talk, to smoke, to dream, save when 

We dream in sooth? 

Not one of them but was humbly grateful to the 
college that it had done thus much for them, that 
it had made possible so rich and intimate a friend- 
ship. But from the rest they stood aloof, and though 
they were personally happy, yet that constructive 
passion that had thrown them together left them 
acutely discontent with the centerlessness of their 
collegiate life. They loved their college, its green 
quads, its gray buildings, its dormitories with their 
fullness and variety of the pageant of youth. If 
their mutual relations were so rich, however, their 
common outward relations with the more official as- 
pects of the college were militant with criticism. 
Their talk was fed by their constant inharmony with 
the life they were standing apart from. They won 
for themselves the current epithets for those who 
hold aloof and criticise. They were, it was said, 
befoulers of their own nests, indifferent, laughing at 
all ardor and enthusiasm. They cried out passion- 
ately at times that it was those others who were in- 
different — those others who took whatever came, 
with uncritical lightness, to whom one thing was as 
good as another. But they were overwhelmed with 
the loud clamor of denial. Yet so far from in- 
different were they that it was their very yearning 
for something to center their ardor upon, to be en- 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 269 

thusiastic about, that stirred their own unrest, their 
own criticism of a nest that had proved for them so 
inhospitable. 

What they were after — and though they did not 
know it in so definite a formula it was a no less 
ardent search — was wisdom rather than informa- 
tion. ^What," they put it again and again to each 
other in moments when the life about them seemed 
overwhelming in its diversity and cross purposes — 
"what the deuce is it all about?" What they felt, 
whenever they came to choose anew from all that 
the college offered them so lavishly was that just 
the larger whole which could stir the loyalty and 
devotion within them, was, though the thing they 
longed for, and the thing for which they had come, 
just the thing that escaped and was lost between 
those neatly packed, self-sufficient parcels. To 
others, perhaps, those parcels were enough, but to 
them whose wanderings took them about the tu- 
multuous city that seemed so blind, so mad, in its 
purposeless energy; whose desultory reading in- 
spired them to a speculative inquiry fed by ideas 
that transcended their immediate experiences; and 
whose talk bluntly put to all their readings and ex- 
periences the most searching questions their errant 
minds could form — to them those parcels of in- 
formation lacked the only significance that could 
have inhered in them — relationship to some larger 
vision, for a sense of which they so ardently longed. 

Once, late in their course, they came upon a phrase 
which fixed for them thenceforth the malady of their 
college from which they were made to suffer, and 
their triumphant repetitions of it on numberless oc- 



2 70 A Lover of the Chair 

casions were no doubt exasperating to their less dis- 
contented fellows. Pseudodoxia Epidemical Their 
college was "not a single discourse of one continuous 
tenor, of which the latter part rose from the former/' 
as Dr. Johnson, for whom they formed a rebellious 
love, said of that work of Sir Thomas Browne, "but 
an enumeration of many unrelated particulars." 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica indeed! They were not 
prigs. They had a normal, healthy resistance to 
the cultural process, but there came a time when they 
rose to a sense of rebellion at the very freedom which 
the college gave them, and which their fellows 
gloried in — a time when they would have wel- 
comed a minute compulsion which would have re- 
lieved them of the pain that each new necessity of 
choice forced them to suffer. Those others had, 
perhaps, aims which they could conceive before 
they were fitted to attain them; but for them, their 
purpose was one that only discipline itself could 
train them to conceive. 

Their last days were bitter. How could they have 
been otherwise? They had their friendship, but 
that was now soon to be broken up, and from their 
college they had got nothing permanent. The facts, 
the information of their studies, had disappeared, 
and they had never attained to a point of view, a 
standard of judgment. And though they had done 
what the college had required of them, and done it so 
well that the college had awarded them all the honors 
in its gift, their own sense of its service was that it 
had but enabled them to see with disabused senses 
how empty, how futile it had proved to be, how 
feebly it maintained the austerities of its great tra- 



Pseudodoxia Epidemica 271 

ditions, and for themselves how vague their sense of 
a structure to which the play of their spirits might 
contribute, how empty the future for their spirits 
with all hope of guidance gone from them. 

What wonder that beneath the final gayeties with 
which they tried to celebrate the one thing which 
the college had given them — friendship — there lay 
a passionate bitterness that their college had left 
their spirits as uncentered as it had found them at 
the beginning? They were passionately bitter, but 
their bitterness was the smouldering of a faith in 
their spirits — a faith that still burned in them that 
there was something there to build up. 



IV 

IN QUEST OF THE CENTER 

HIS later fortunes — our youth who had passed 
so rebelliously through his college years — 
were ironic and curious. The college had left him 
without a point of view, without an attitude to life; 
and so strongly bent was his mind, wrought upon 
by his family heritage, his early poverty, his years 
of rebellious faith in the life of the spirit, that a 
point of view, an attitude to life, was for him, pas- 
sionately, the one thing for which he cared. His 
college, however, which he would have said had done 
nothing for him, had done thus much: it had found 
him desultorily reading Emerson, Arnold, Coleridge, 
and Sir Thomas Browne; and had left him desul- 
torily reading Spencer, Haeckel, Ibsen, and Bernard 
Shaw. But even of them he had disconcerting doubts. 
His uncentered mind still had before it the search, 
not for a goal but for a starting point. 

He wandered far, and in his quest he touched 
upon many of the devotions, the theories, the phil- 
osophies, by which those of his time were trying to 
comport themselves as both players and pawns in 
the game. The vagaries of his course were what 
his college had left him subject to: he had no bal- 
last, no compass, and no impulsion but a passionate 
desire to arrive. His mind, uninformed, and un- 



In Quest of the Center 273 

formed by a knowledge of the significant thought of 
the past, did its thinking in crudely generic terms. 
And in his ignorance and the crude generality of his 
thought he mounted, with a triumph that was not 
without its pathos, to the conception of many a 
world-old commonplace. 

It was one of the ironies at which he himself was 
able to smile, that he never in reality left the college. 
He could smile, though bitterly, at the sudden light 
that his appointment threw on the emptiness of his 
own college years. He was a part of the fountain 
now, he himself, for all his ignorance. The mirthless 
humor of the situation increased in him the impatient 
recklessness that had roughened his manners and 
made his speech harsh. 

His acceptance made him aware that even his 
own failure in the college had not wholly daunted 
his faith that what he had not got was none the less 
there. As he looked out at the world it was still 
the college that contained the mystery, though he 
had failed to come upon it. And no doubt it was 
the sense that there he might still wander in his 
search that had given him the thrill with which he 
had welcomed the chance to stay within its walls. 
He did not at the first moment realize how soon the 
irony of his own position would envelop him. It 
was but the greater when it came upon him, that he 
was to profess the very literature from which the 
college itself had in a measure weaned him. 

Were those others, he presently came to ask, as 
vague as he as to what ultimate thing he was driving 
at? Were they perhaps unaware, those grey-beards, 



2 74 A Lover of the Chair 

that there was a structure toward which they should 
be building? Were they unaware of their own 
vagueness? It came home to him doggedly, how- 
ever, in spite of the rebellion which made him so 
arrogantly impatient with the blindness of those who 
could not penetrate his own shallows, that he was as 
yet a mere novice elevated no doubt more for his 
promise than for his attainment. He spent his first 
year, therefore, in search and inquiry, with more pet- 
ulance than he could justify in his more urbane mo- 
ments, but without rancor and with an open mind. 
Did those others know, those others who — so 
specifically did he probe — were beside him and 
above him in his own work, what the deuce it was 
all about? From his own older observations he 
knew that they were divided into factions with 
curious mutual contempt. One of these factions was 
concerned with the emotional values of language and 
literature, and the other with their historical origins. 
For his own part, by virtue of the impulse that had 
first brought him to the college, he would instinc- 
tively have fallen among the emotional interpreters, 
had it not been for a circumstance that had arisen 
from the vagrancies of his early experience. As it 
was, however, this circumstance held him aloof from 
both. The prompt result was that he came to be- 
lieve that the thing he had so long hunted for with- 
out success he must find elsewhere than in the pur- 
suit of his own business — perhaps even elsewhere 
than in the college. The effect on his own work 
was that it became a curious hybrid intrinsically no 
nearer his sense of right than either of the factions 
he was holding aloof from. But for him it had the 



In Quest of the Center 275 

virtue of not having crystallized into what he felt 
to be definitely wrong. He suffered, however, a 
renewal of the misery that had so long dogged his 
thinking moments. He had attained to no sense of 
life; he was still adrift. 

The circumstance that held him so aloof from the 
tendency of the factions was the remembrance of 
his own early poverty, and his quickened sympathy 
for the sordid chaos of the city in which his days 
were fallen — remote considerations enough in 
their apparent detachment from his problem, but 
for him marking inevitably the way of his approach. 
As the year crept by that followed the beginning 
of his duties his reflection threw him more and more 
into doubt, and at last into utter negation of the 
value of the routine of his teaching. What was its 
point in its isolation from the general life? Echoes 
of such a cry came to him in his reveries, in his 
wanderings about the city, in the reading he had 
fallen into. He understood the general life with all 
the vividness born of harsh experience, and slowly 
but without bitterness he generalized it into an in- 
justice that constituted the great human problem. 
What indeed was life for if not for those who lived 
it? And what were its institutions for if not to 
make it more perfect for them? But the college — ! 
His impatience grew. 

In retrospect the tenuous thread of accidents that 
had rescued him from a lifetime of sordid struggle 
for bread seemed to have been saved from breaking 
so fortuitously that he could not think of it without 
a shudder. It had miraculously not broken ; and he 
had gone to college. Was he now, however, he who 



276 A Lover of the Chair 

knew so keenly what poverty meant, to isolate him- 
self from all connection with the common lot? Was 
the college after all merely an escape? Did it not 
gain its significance from its service to humanity? 
It was just that significance that he was unable to 
see in the reality before him. He knew that poverty 
was too common an accident to be ignored, yet here 
was he, luckily rescued from it, in the attitude of 
indifference. The snug remoteness of his daily rou- 
tine revolted him. He cast himself passionately 
among the humanitarians. 

So unused was he to the drive of a positive en- 
thusiasm that in its first moments he gave an un- 
checked rein to his humanitarian impulse. He saw 
with new eyes the chaotic city about him, its squalor, 
its depravity, its waste of humanity. He saw, more 
bitterly than all, young children growing up in sur- 
roundings such as to condemn them, before they 
could raise a voice in protest, to a lifetime no better 
than the life they were born to. In the intensity of 
his feelings he saw the subjective equality of men 
in the right to happiness. And the spectacle he 
saw before him was one of appalling inequality. The 
eternal mystery of consciousness, the haphazard dis- 
tribution of identity, the inequality of natural gifts, 
he could muse upon without destroying his sense 
that for much of the variety of fortune to which con- 
scious identities were born humanity itself was re- 
sponsible. 

With that acceptance of responsibility, aptly 
enough, there had come to him, as to many, the 
sense of power to meet it. At a critical moment his 
mind had been seized and formed by the evolution- 



In Quest of the Center 277 

ary conception. It would not have been possible 
now, if it had been desirable, to cast his thoughts in 
any other mould. Perhaps because, with the scien- 
tific movement, the humanities had dropped into 
a minor place, it was easier for the people of his time 
to think of human life in terms of biology than it 
would have been for an earlier generation. The 
scientific world had gone with Darwin and Huxley 
and Spencer. With it as with them the biological 
analogy had becom.e the biological identity. And in 
biology the whole of the past had come to be summed 
up in a word: Evolution. The conception was in- 
toxicating. At last men seemed to have grasped 
life as a whole. The sense of its slow and painful 
duration and development, slowly and painfully ac- 
quired by the old humanists from the records of 
human thought and experience, was here foreshort- 
ened by the flash of a definition that revealed the 
process of life from its beginning, and cast light 
ahead into the future. Boxed into the brief compass 
of a word life seemed somehow easily dirigible. 

Round about lay the whole body of scientific 
knowledge to be mastered and enlarged and applied 
to human life; and before stretched the new route 
of humanity whose destiny now lay in its own self- 
conscious power. Life could be rationalized. In- 
stead of the haphazardry of chance which had made 
such fearful waste and suffering as he saw about 
him, there could be ordered a social process in which 
every individual should be brought to the highest 
possible development. Here was a service, it seemed 
to him in the sweep of his new outlook, to which he 
might devote himself without the hesitations that 



278 A Lover of the Chair 

had dogged his professional Hfe. He spent a period 
bitterly regretting that in his first vision of science 
there had not been revealed to him the connection 
between science and the human problems with which 
he was so persistently concerned. The emptiness of 
his college years might then have been filled with 
just that significance for which he had so passion- 
ately longed. 

In the midst of such musings he stood, one dusk, 
at a down-town street corner half filled with shame 
that he still held aloof from the real work of life. 
Stores and counting houses and factories were clos- 
ing, and clerks and operatives tired from the routine 
of the day thronged the streets. Wistful girls' faces, 
still young, still pretty, but with the mark of the 
curse already upon them, peered at him as he stood, 
himself wistful and sympathetic, at the side of the 
human stream. Once or twice he caught in an un- 
derstanding face an answering sympathy, and he 
glowed with a rush of feeling that confirmed mys- 
teriously his sense that his academic aloofness was 
essentially wrong. The warm pulse of humanity 
throbbed at his heart. Once there passed him an 
evil fellow cursing his drunken wife. There was 
no redeeming virtue in the man's own face; he too 
was sodden with drink. But our youth was more 
touched with the incident as it was than if the man 
had been better himself. Here was no mere per- 
sonal tragedy of virtue victimized by vice. That 
would have been of the native warp of life. Here 
was something larger in which responsible society 
itself was the oppressor, crushing out the possibility 
of virtue from both victims. He shuddered at the 



In Quest of the Center 279 

picture. And back in his mind there came a mock- 
ing voice repeating what he had said that morning 
to the generous youths whose minds he was helping 
to train: 'The beauties of the Faerie Queene lie in 
that very detachment from reality that has freed the 
poet's fancy from all sordid restraints." How paltry 
it sounded, cold, aloof, remote from the actual life of 
suffering man, and to be indulged only by ignor- 
ing the substratum of human misery! Was the col- 
lege, after all, only a private device of the elect to 
enable them to escape from the intrusive responsi- 
bility of life? And was he, having escaped, to devote 
himself to freeing others from this responsibility? 

He returned at night within the college walls with 
a sense of emptiness and discontent more poignant 
than he had ever known. The expensive elegance of 
the college architecture, far removed from the sor- 
did squalor he had but now caught a glimpse of, re- 
volted him. His comfortable supper revolted him. 
The Faerie Queene on his study table revolted him. 
And the thought that he would in another day be 
back at the task of leading youths out of a vital 
concern for life — he who knew so well the colossal 
injustice of civilization — taunted him insupportably. 
He had lost his humor, but he laughed outright, 
mockingly, at the spectacle he made for himself. In 
the madness of the moment he dramatized for the 
morrow an impassioned revolt before his startled 
class, a wild fling at the smug process he was assist- 
ing at and they were submitting to. He felt fiercely 
that he could endure it no longer. 

And in the white glow of his passion there came 
to him a revelation. Never before had he been so 



28o A Lover of the Chair 

intimately, so wholly himself, so free from the ob- 
structive trammels of criticism and doubt. Never 
had he felt so at one with himself, internal assent 
going out to meet impulse. Criticism and doubt! 
He saw that what he had been wasting his years 
looking for in the college was an intellectual unity 
in his conception of life. What wonder he had found 
nothing! It was suddenly borne in on him that life 
was a matter of living, and that its unity lay not in 
an intellectual grasp but in an impulse vitalized by 
emotion. He attained in a moment to a sense of how 
essentially and obtrusively an outsider was that in- 
tellect that had taken its seat in men's minds to the 
disturbance of their internal unity. He had found 
himself at last! 

His next step, as he came to realize, was but a 
confirmation of one of the findings of his passion: 
the reason was an intruder. But the confirmation 
came from so different a source and with so differ- 
ent a coloring that he had shifted his loyalty to his 
intelligence before he recognized the path he was 
following. 

In his present loyalty to his passions, however, the 
immediate restlessness of inaction was intolerable, 
and he left his room in search of quiet for his spirit. 
It was perhaps an echo of that rationalism that was 
inherent in him that sent him now to an advocatus 
diaboli in the form of an obscure Grecian whose 
aloofness was complete, yet whose very aloofness 
had a quiet authority that appealed to him. Tonight, 
however, when weary of mind and body he had 
sunk into the great chair hospitably drawn up before 



In Quest of the Center 281 

the fireplace, and had taken a mellow cigar from 
his host's inlaid humidor, the very seductiveness 
of the moment in those pleasant surroundings cried 
out to his conscience. The Persian rugs under his 
feet, the great racks of books against the walls, the 
few rare pictures, the rich curtains, even now seemed 
to dull the vividness of that other spectacle that 
had so crystallized the impulses of his generous 
sympathy. 

He could, he knew, have broached the burning 
question within him, and won a sympathetic analy- 
sis of his case from his quiet friend; but he had no 
need: the rich seclusion of this burial among the 
records of the past, of this content with life at second 
hand, was eloquent of the findings that would come 
of such an analysis. His host had confronted too, 
no doubt, the problem of Hfe; and the shelter of the 
cloister was his solution. 

The evening was not, however, without its im- 
plicit broaching of the issue. They looked together 
at curious old books with quaint pictures, at rare 
first editions, and talked lightly of the strange, fitful 
aberrations of the human spirit — of the sophists, 
of the schoolmen mediaeval and modern, of the 
Blakes, the Newmans, the Tolstoys in their vain 
eternal quest for the quiet of the soul. But the 
older man, with delicacy, had no unasked dogmatism 
for his guest; and the younger man was too uncer- 
tain of his own purposes to risk subsequent affront 
to advice which he knew he might evoke. They 
spoke of Plato. His host, with a smile, drew from 
beneath the light on his table the blotted draft of 
matter yet fresh from his pen and incomplete. 



2 82 A Lover of the Chair 

^'A moment's mood," he said, smiling gravely, "but 
here in the midst of the turmoil of a life that has got 
beyond our control by its very numbers, and by 
giving over the reins to numbers, I sometimes re- 
volt. I am no poet, alas! but the spectacle of life 
is sometimes too poignant for utter silence. These 
lines are serious, but only half serious." 

The younger man read the passage without 
comment. 

Colors flashing upon the retina; motion, change, va- 
riety stimulating the eager vision; sounds jailing grate- 
fully upon the ear, of poplar leaves on still midnights, 
of flames upon the burning hearth, of winter winds in 
the chimney, of low unhurried voices; love, or hate, or 
ambition, or anger, or sympathy — above all, sym- 
pathy — concentrating the soul upon outward things; 
fair faces, fair forms, stately music, humane justice, 
bringing the hush of wonder upon the spirit; the rush 
of life, its traffickings, its moth-like beating about the 
marsh-lights of pleasure, the heaps of broken wings and 
bodies seen at dawn the sport of the forgetful winds; 
the ardent sense that deep-seated in the soul is a vision 
of simple order which, could it but find a voice, might 
breathe a meaning into the chaotic elements — such 
are the moments when reality impinges with intensity. 

Then, sudden, a veil falls upon the spirit, and reality, 
the vision of life, becomes but a vision indeed, becomes 
but the shadow of a dream, so unmotived the exits and 
the entrances, so purposeless the sufferings, so empty the 
foolishness and the wisdom, so meaningless even the 
happiness that alone could make the evanescent con- 
sciousness of being worth the insistent pain of life. If 
then life be but a dream — for that dreams come and 
go and bring strange recombinations in kaleidoscopic 



In Quest of the Center 283 

succession, the impatient soul might, not unworthily, 
wish to choose for its own phantom passage its own 
phantom moment, Then — 

O Chronos, dream again, if it be sooth 

That life be but the shadow of your dream, 

And we its shadow puppets. Dream again. 

Dream me a Greek upon the agora. 

There to hold converse with wise Socrates, 

When life was young, and wisdom in its youth 

Unfettered by the phantom facts of time, 

Held to the heart and soul of living men. 

Then might I walk with Plato — still unguessed 

The anguish of all time once he was gone. 

And it were well to feel the human warmth 

Of austere virtue bodied in a god — 

A thing of beauty and a presence near — 

It was a fantastic, futile, whimsical conception, 
but the young man read it in his present state of 
mind with an intensity that he tried to conceal even 
from the author himself. Out of all proportion to 
what it said it awoke echoes of old, long-silent voices 
within him. And when he rose to go it was with a 
strange complex of emotions that kept him from a 
word of comment or applause. 

He said good-night, and launched himself into the 
empty streets to walk until he should again have 
composed his newly aroused spirit. 

Most curiously his passion of the afternoon had 
died. The passion of the growth of months had 
quietly ebbed — it smote him in his shame — under 
the soft influence of an hour in the midst of luxury, 
and talk of the enhaloed past. That his passion 
should have died so easily, however, was but an 



284 A Lover of the Chair 

additional impulse to his conscience. He would 
follow the day's impulse though the passion had gone 
out of it. His conscience dominated him. 

Under the cool stars he looked curiously upon 
this sharp duality that had suddenly disintegrated 
itself inside him — no less that they both for the 
moment pointed in the same direction. They were 
of different orders, deriving from different seats of 
authority. Their commands echoed from different 
quarters. He questioned searchingly the paradox 
that, between the two, his allegiance went with the 
one that seemed the less native, the one that he 
seemed even to love the less and whose right he could 
not explain — his conscience. 

Seeing his allegiance secure but without the en- 
dearing impulse of feeling, he tried to rally his emo- 
tions to his support to make his final obedience less 
perfunctory. He recalled tauntingly his host's 
phrase, ''here in the midst of the turmoil of life," to 
describe the seclusion of that aloof library where it 
was known that he spent all his leisure hours, and 
of which a single hour had sufficed to thrust off into 
unmeasured distance that turmoil of life and its 
poignant injustices against which but a moment be- 
fore our youth had risen in passionate rebellion. He 
recalled his host's slighting reference to numbers. 
He recalled the dream fantasy with its nostalgic 
straining toward the past. But his passion still lay 
dormant, if not dead. 

He knew, however, that on the morrow he would 
take some step in that service to humanity which he 
had deferred so long. He pictured to himself the 
humble tasks of relieving poverty, comforting 



In Quest of the Center 285 

despair, instructing elementary ignorance. There 
at least, however vague his present sense of practical 
means, he should know what he was driving at. And 
though it would be work done in obscurity, and go 
perceptibly no farther than the few wretches whom 
he could reach, it would at least for his own peace of 
mind be something that he could see the significance 
of. If he should go to it without passionate enthu- 
siasm it would at least satisfy his reason and his 
conscience. In the freedom of his mood he followed 
an impulse and went again, alone now, on one of 
those midnight rambles that had added their touch 
of endearing lawlessness to his undergraduate friend- 
ship. And when he came, by way of the old route, 
to the lake he sat down on a deserted bench and let 
his mind take its undirected flight. That it went off 
into corollaries of his day's experience was in keep- 
ing with his natural bent. He had an instinctive ab- 
horrence of isolated data ; he was more concerned for 
the relations of the fact than for the fact itself. The 
particular facet of his day's experience that his pres- 
ent corollaries sprang from was his discovery of the 
duality of his internal government. It intrigued 
him; and it intrigued him the more because though 
he had known of it and could have phrased it any 
time these many years, yet only now had it become 
a practical reality for him. He had found it, so to 
speak, in its own natural lair, working in its work- 
ing garb in its own workshop. The cold psychology 
of it phrased in analytical terms had never come 
home to him. 

It was incidentally to this last perception that his 
eyes were suddenly open to the significance of the 



286 A Lover of the Chair 

scholastic work he had taken up. For he caught a 
fleeting glimpse of the peculiar fact of literature — 
that unlike the sciences that dealt analytically and 
mechanically with the human aspects of life, litera- 
ture dealt with them where they were to be found, 
and with all their clothing of emotional force. What 
for him had always been so merely pleasurable came 
upon him keenly as something else, something very 
close to a revelation of truth as it existed for human 
use. 

The perception was as yet general, but he saw in 
it a field for a wide and revealing development. And 
it struck him as a touch of irony that the significance 
he had struggled so long and so blindly for he should 
see for the first time just now when he was on the 
point of abandoning it for something else. But he 
wrenched himself from these regrets and went on 
arily into the pleasant speculations that he had 
caught a glimpse of. 

A pair of verses from his host's fantastic poem 
repeated themselves in his mind, and associated 
themselves significantly with the dual government he 
had but now been so keen about. 

And it were well to feel the human warmth 
Of austere virtue bodied in a god. 

His thoughts took easy wing; matters that before 
had lain isolated and inert fell into clarifying rela- 
tions. He realized now that the sense of external 
authority, as distinguished from the internal pas- 
sions, was, for all the anthropologists, the real basis 
of religion ; and he felt for the first time — he who 
at one time had expected to enter the church — a 



In Quest of the Center 287 

spontaneous religious impulse. The inspiration of 
the Hebrew prophets, always before to him a curious 
phenomenon of a strange, isolated people, became 
one with the inspiration of all those who had at- 
tained in spirit to the seat of that external authority 
that looked down serenely but inexorably upon hu- 
man affairs. The familiar demon of Socrates, at 
which he had smiled indulgently, became a reality 
— the externalization by a poetic nature of that 
same authority. Confirmations fell in from odd 
nooks of his memory. A passage that long ago had 
impressed him from a translation of the Antigone 
sprang into new vitality — the maiden's tragic 
obedience to 

The unchangeable, the unwritten code of Heaven, 
Which is not of to-day and yesterday, 
But lives forever, having origin 
Whence no man knows. . . . 

The long back-swell from an offshore breeze 
heaved and broke endlessly at his feet, and in the 
darkness under the vast skies, against the great 
background of silence there seemed something in- 
exorable in the somber rush and recession of the 
waters. There, indeed, was a part of nature, of 
which he too was a part, and from which he had 
what he had of life. But he saw something dimly 
that was not working in the heave and flow of the 
swells, something that arrayed itself, in a measure, 
against the mechanic fatal forces that he shared 
with the winds and the waves. Whether it too might 
be a part of that nature he did not then stop to in- 
quire, but he saw that it was a thing distinctively 



2 88 A Lover of the Chair 

human, and that it intruded upon the situation with 
a scheme of its own. 

Rapidly as he sat there in the darkness, and with 
perhaps a too facile generalization, he cast his senses 
and his passions on the side of nature; they were 
things that came with the coming of life and 
flourished without cultivation in the naive freedom 
of neglect. And the intruder was the intelligence, 
with its own conception of a way of life that was 
good, which came with its schemes for directing the 
senses and the passions, guiding the one to special 
aptitudes, and the other to special restraints and di- 
rections. 

He had his love for the senses. He had his love 
for the starry night about him, and for the remem- 
brance of sights and odors and sounds that bound 
him in affection to certain places — the odors of 
certain lanes, the noises of the house heard through 
closed doors in obbligato to the gliding pictures of 
well loved tales, the checkered countrysides of his 
boyhood home. And in his friends he loved the 
fresh spontaneities of smile and gesture, the play 
of spirit, the touches of life. Indeed those were the 
very things he loved. But he loved them when they 
were directed and proportioned to the intruder's 
scheme. For he had seen sensuality and gluttony 
and malice and envy and anger and cowardice — 
spontaneities as natural and lively as the beat of 
the waves at his feet — and he had hated them. He 
knew that though it was life he valued, it was life 
tempered and proportioned. 

In the rapid outline of his case he paused for a 
moment over the conscience. It was not intelli- 



In Quest of the Center 289 

gence, he saw ait once. It belonged to the affections. 
Reluctantly he conceded it to the side of nature. 
But he saw, too, that if it belonged there it was, 
none the less, the tie between nature and the in- 
truder — the sanction for the intruder's authority. 
It was a spontaneous loyalty to the intrusive schemes 
for the good. 

He rose slowly and began his slow march home- 
ward. There was a peace in his mind that he had 
not known since the first innocent year of his col- 
lege life. He was still, indeed, far from out of the 
bog he had been struggling to get free from. But he 
had at last a sense of the direction to follow. 

Characteristically he saw the danger that in his 
intellectual excitement he might dull his own sense 
of responsibility to the external authority that had 
taken residence in his conscience; and when the 
afternoon of the following day found him free he 
betook himself resolutely to one of those modern 
'^settlements" where so nobly men and women of 
refinement and intelligence had thrown themselves 
on the general stream of humanity with the hope 
of rendering a service perceptible and direct to 
those who were most deeply submerged. He went 
with a head cooler and a heart lighter than he had 
had for many a day. He had, it was true, a sense 
of loss — loss of the enthusiasm which yesterday 
had promised to make him a passionate devotee, 
and for which his gain of a rational self-direction 
was not a direct substitute. He had not lost, how- 
ever, what had lain at the bottom of his original 
impulse — the sense that life was plastic in the in- 



290 A Lover of the Chair 

creasingly self-conscious hands of humanity itself; 
that devoted service in the moulding of the future 
might be directly related to that end he had so 
futilely groped for in the long blind wanderings 
through his college years. 

It was a shock to him, when he came to it, to find 
that he had overlooked the matter of his own de- 
pendence — that he had nothing to offer but his un- 
trained services, and that he must live by his own 
work elsewhere. He clung therefore to his college, 
and offered to the settlement his leisure hours. He 
plunged with devotion into simple duties among the 
ignorant and oppressed, and with them at times his 
sympathies brought him almost to the height of his 
early passion. The great injustices of life came 
home to him in the concrete. Victims of greed, of 
bad laws, of good laws unenforced; children broken 
body and soul by work, by evil environment; girls 
dragged in the mire by men's evil passions; old age 
crushed by relentless want, outcast and neglected, 
dying in corners; worse than all, depravity that had 
been born and bred to depravity; and more touching 
than all, the silent heroism of the poor. 

If in his present state he had been less rational 
the force of his feelings might have carried him 
wholly into the work of the settlement, for oppor- 
tunity soon came by which he might have dropped 
his connection with the college and earned his living 
in the very service itself. He could smile, a little 
ruefully perhaps but still smile, to see that his hang- 
ing back helped to confirm the ill repute that the 
reason acquires in some very worthy minds. But 
in his old college days he had grown inured to the 



In Quest of the Center 291 

easy blame of those who had Httle experience of 
the inner drive of an idea. And now there had re- 
vived in him in the midst of his labors, in spite of 
his own uneasy sense of disloyalty, in spite of his 
knowledge that reason often became the tool of sloth 
and desire, the sharp restraint of a rational doubt. 
And he hesitated. He had viewed humanity from 
below, stirred by a sense of mastery in the vast 
sweep of the term evolution, by the sense of life's 
plasticity, and by the sense of human responsibility 
and power; and he had tried to enrich the lives of 
some of those who had been trampled to the bottom. 
No doubt here and there he had helped. But he saw 
with discouragement how feeble was the remedy at 
best, and how wild the trampling. He had no 
criticism for those who so nobly did the work of 
relief; but he saw clearly that they were not fight- 
ing the battle — that they were but caring for the 
wounded. For him, he wanted to enter the fight 
itself. 

His old constructive passion was again clamorous, 
and though he knew how empty his own college 
years had been, and though he saw in neither his 
own teaching nor that of his colleagues about him 
anything that should make the college better for 
those that followed him, there came to him a per- 
ception that made him cling to the college in spite 
of his doubts. In his harsh contact with the con- 
crete injustices of life, there came the sharp rein- 
forcement of the distinction he had attained to in 
his own mind. As he looked about him he saw, in 
print of life, wisdom giving to humanity the clue to 
all it had of the good, and the unrestrained passions 



292 A Lover of the Chair 

all it had that horrified him. He could only con- 
clude that the task of construction lay in the de- 
velopment of that wisdom, and in the restraint and 
guidance of those passions. 

In the meantime he had passed through a period 
when he had gone heart and soul with the socialists. 
They at least were fighting the battle itself. They 
recognized the human responsibility for human evo- 
lution, and seemed to promise in their seizing and 
molding of the social process the rationalization of 
what until now had been so cruel in its anarchy. 
He studied anew his Marx, his Wells, the latter with 
its stirrings of a kindly sympathy so like his own 
that his criticism was lulled to slumber. But in 
time it awoke, and he saw in the schemes of so- 
cialism obstacles that checked him sharply in his 
conversion. In the harsh questions that he put to 
himself over the miseries that fell now so un- 
ceasingly to his notice, there came to him doubts 
even of democracy itself. 

He had not accepted the humanitarian dogma of 
responsibility without the rational privilege of ap- 
plying it to whatever came within the humanitarian 
net; and now he saw that if humanity were respon- 
sible for the better conduct of the future it was also 
responsible for the evil of the present. It was of 
the essence of democracy that it opened up for ap- 
plication to the problems of social life all existing 
human wisdom. In the vividness of his horror at 
the spectacle about him he could only conclude that 
that wisdom was, in so far, at least, inadequate — 
that it had not found human life so plastic or itself 



In Quest of the Center 293 

so skillful as to make the spectacle perceptibly less 
terrible to compassionate eyes. For the zeal of his 
fathers who had established democracy he had the 
defense that they were at least shifting the govern- 
ment from the tried to the untried — from the tried 
few under whom the evil of life had seemed un- 
bearable, to the untried many who at least had 
suffered and been disciplined in the lessons of that 
evil. For him now, however, there was still the 
spectacle of that evil — which democracy had not 
cured — driving him to seek a new, a wiser, a more 
compassionate moulder of humanity than those who 
had been tried and found wanting. And when he 
looked about him for a new and untried wisdom, 
he found in socialism, at least, no shift. If the 
people had been found wanting in the democracy, 
it was still they who were, in the new scheme, to 
mould a plastic humanity — the same wisdom which 
had put evil men into power, passed evil laws, failed 
to enforce good ones, and failed to right the very 
wrongs and injustices that alone were driving him 
to seek a remedy. 

The moral struggle, the slow, self-denying labor 
that went to the building up of character was too 
personal, was in the very nature of the case too 
individual to be much helped by governmental de- 
vices. And when he heard the old plea that the 
cure for democracy was more democracy he could 
smile sadly at the pathos of the hope. For what 
was there in any government to increase the virtue 
and develop the characters of its people. And the 
present one was perfect enough in theory to be as 
good as the people who made it up. It was not that 



294 A Lover of the Chair 

he had lost sympathy for the poor victims of in- 
justice and degradation, but that he could see no 
wisdom and virtue in a system apart from the wis- 
dom and virtue in the people who administered it, 
and he saw in democracy already the expressed 
quality of just those people who would make up 
the new regime. He saw no reason to suppose that 
their quality would be better under a vastly more 
complex and more difficult system. It was not, 
either, that he despised democracy. He was bred 
to it, and it had his loyalty. But he could not be- 
lieve that socialism would be better. Indeed his 
loyalty to democracy was loyalty to its freedom, 
and in socialism there seemed to lurk a despotism 
that destroyed even that. For freedom was moral 
opportunity. 

From this point he could sum up his case. If 
wisdom were to mold humanity it was, he knew, 
no one's wisdom but theirs. Theirs he had looked 
at, and the spectacle of its products had driven him 
afield for a time in search of more and other wisdom. 
But at last he had come back; all the available wis- 
dom to guide humanity lay in the minds of men, 
and all men had been tried — the one, the few, the 
many — and each in turn had been found in some 
measure wanting. Now there was nowhere to turn. 
The pursuit had come to the last ditch. There was, 
however, this to be said — that if human evolution 
did depend upon human wisdom there was still 
something to be done. He had groped to this point 
when the time came for him to choose between 
service in the settlement and his place in the college. 
And he chose the college. 



In Quest of the Center 295 

It was not without misgivings that he gave up the 
humanitarian work he had begun so earnestly. It 
was hard to convince his aggrieved friends that he 
had not proved disloyal to the promises of his old 
enthusiasm. But for himself he knew that his loy- 
alty was unmarred. He was a humanitarian still, 
but he had shifted the field of his labor. With his 
new conception the college became a place trans- 
figured. There, he saw, was his work. He went to 
it with a singing heart. 

He signalized his spiritual return to the college 
by another visit to the advocatus diaboli; and as 
from the earlier one he came away charmed but in 
rebellion at his host's cloistered seclusion and pre- 
occupation with the past. He broached on this 
occasion his own conclusions and his own eagerness 
to get at the heart of his problem. The reply he 
evoked was but a qualified approval. 

"You are right, but you are too eager," said his 
host. "You hope for immediate returns — for per- 
ceptible results upon the evils and injustices that 
none of us can shut our eyes to. But unless you find 
deeper ground for your satisfaction than the per- 
ceptible results of teaching itself, you will lose heart. 
For your efforts will never show. There are re- 
sults, ultimate and imperceptible; we must believe 
that or give up. But the hope of quick returns is 
the curse of modern life — in business, in education, 
in the humanitarian movement itself." 

Our youth still clung to the humanitarian hopes 
that had committed him so recently to the college. 
But the poison, evil or good, of his friend's criticism 
clogged the flow of his spirits and drove him back 



296 A Lover of the Chair 

into troubled cogitations that seemed for a time to 
threaten the basis of all his hopes. In time the dull 
pain at the fading of his illusions left him in listless 
misery. But he checked his discouragement with 
some vigor; and though he had grown sick of his 
own thoughts, and sick of the large terms in which 
alone he could cast them, he forced himself back to 
his problem. 

His rebellion was that what his friend had told 
him came home to him as true. But he had so set 
his heart on perceptible results that to go to work' 
in bare faith, in a field where faith itself was dying, 
was intolerably bitter. There were times when, im- 
patient of the slow, uncertain effect of the literature 
he was trying to create a concern for in those 
younger men who had so little native concern for it, 
he was tempted to stifle his doubts and in the face 
of his aloof friend's warning and his own better 
sense, go over to that other thing within the college 
that seemed to get so much more directly at the im- 
mediate affairs of men. He was tempted to go over 
into sociology. 

In the reflections which, now that he was used 
to the drive of an emotion, he let loose hard on the 
heels of an impulse, it was only the distrust of his 
own stability that kept him back. So baffled was 
he, so empty, that in despair he was driven into the 
wilderness for fasting and prayer. 

When he emerged there was a spark of Hght in 
his soul, and though it did not at once illumine all 
the twistings of his maze, it burned steadily and 
gave him hope. 

From the detachment to which he had attained 



In Quest of the Center 297 

he reahzed how arrogant had been the passion of 
that haste with which he had tried to seize upon 
Hfe. He saw the shallow impatience of even that 
slower process with which he had come back to the 
college. He saw simply and with shame that what 
in crude generalization he called wisdom was 
to be got only from men who had it. The phrase 
was simple, but its simplicity was not significant of 
the revolution that it created in his humbled mind. 
He perceived sharply a new distinction between the 
intimate passions and senses on the one hand, and on 
the other that wisdom which it was so important to 
create and spread among a responsible humanity. 
For whereas the former were inherent and born 
anew in the body of every man, as he had seen on 
that night on the lake shore, the latter, wisdom, was 
not inherent, and would die outright if left to nature. 
He saw now still more clearly the distinction for 
which he had groped so blindly in his fruitless col- 
lege days — that the spiritual structure was that 
slow accumulation of wisdom which men had so 
painfully been building through the ages — an in- 
tangible structure which nature ignored, which lived 
outside of nature, and which would vanish save for 
its voluntary, painful re-creation by those who mas- 
tered it anew. It dwelt nowhere but in men's minds, 
and dwelt there only by perpetual conscious re- 
mastery. 

This, then, was the spiritual structure; this 
marked the eternal distinction between nature and 
human nature; this was the human product which 
men must perpetually renew and augment if human 
life was to be ennobled in its own peculiar kind. 



298 A Lover of the Chair 

He bowed humbly before the idea, with a shamed 
knowledge that he was but arriving at a sense of 
life attained long since by many men in all ages. 
But he took comfort in the thought that this attain- 
ment itself was a part of that eternal re-creation 
that must forever go on if the spiritual structure 
were to endure. His mind swept over the literature 
and history that he had used to read so desultorily, 
so keenly, with so little sense of its significance, but 
with so right an instinct for its worth. That was 
the human accomplishment — the humanities. The 
word put on a meaning not objectively different from 
what he had always put into it, but subjectively 
enriched and vitalized out of all resemblance. 

He looked back from this fresh point of view 
with a quickened understanding of his humanitarian 
past. The word still had for him a connotation so 
appealing to every gentler fiber of his nature that 
he had need even now of his hard-earned submission 
to the final authority of his reason. It was not 
easy, this struggle against his own generosity and 
against the silent reproaches of friends he had but 
now so devotedly seconded. But he had tried the 
humanitarians, and he had found them tainted with 
impatience, by a shallow haste to apply remedies to. 
the symptoms of the disease they had set out to 
cure. And the evil itself — he had vague glim- 
merings of a vision in which, properly speaking, it 
was not really an evil — a vision in which he saw 
the slow march of the human spirit upon the chaos 
of pure animalism; whatever encroachments hu- 
manity had made upon the stark horror of brute 



In Quest of the Center 299 

life was so much gained — gained by the slow ac- 
cumulation of a knowledge of life, the slow building 
up of the spiritual structure. What he, and they 
the humanitarians, had so much shuddered at was 
the still unconquered field of the natural man — the 
natural as sharply distinguished from the humane, 
a remnant rather than an outgrowth. He saw that 
if they and he found it an evil, they found it so by 
virtue of a point of view made possible by that at- 
tainment of the human spirit to which they were 
latterly become so inimical. 

For those who worked in the direct rehef of 
suffering he still retained the warmest sympathy, 
knowing that what they did was a good in itself. 
But he was bitter — and he smiled now to realize 
it — against what he knew so well from his own 
recollection of himself — the humanitarian antag- 
onism to those who devoted themselves to the mas- 
tery and perpetuation of what men had already 
gained. How antagonistic they were he was not 
left without present reasons for knowing, for he was 
filled with reproaches from many sources. But it 
was not these that made him bitter; it was the per- 
ception that it had been the humanitarian diversion 
that had made it possible for him to pass his under- 
graduate years so wholly blind as to what the college 
and he were there for. In the restful security of 
his present point of view he could be amazed by 
those honors by which the college had proclaimed 
that he had got the best it had to offer. Obviously 
it had ceased to think of itself as the agent of that 
perpetual re-creation in the minds of men of the 
wisdom by which life was to be made humane. 



300 A Lover of the Chair 

He was free now of the obstructive trees, and 
could look back on his path and see the forest he 
had been wandering in. He had come out not far 
from where he had entered. He had spent a waste- 
ful time in it. But he was not without something 
in his bag. He had got an understanding of the 
environing movement of his time; and he had found 
his way out. The endearing quest for happiness, 
striking across-lots direct for its elusive object 
through the old pathetic deceptions of the senses 
and the passions, and through the simple elemen- 
tary passion for material possession, had lost its 
way. They had forgot, these eager questers, that 
only the slow development of wisdom could produce 
the happiness they longed for. And even those 
generous few who were sacrificing themselves to 
care for the poor had forgot that in trying to bend 
every instrument to the direct relief of poverty and 
to the immediate wants of the multitude they were 
destroying the means of whatever ultimate amelior- 
ation of the human lot there could be. 

The age of unprecedented concern for the poor 
was an age of unprecedented wealth. Clearly some- 
thing was wrong. When he looked to the ultimate 
vision of the humanitarians he saw that the modi- 
fications which they were making in social life, in 
government, and in education all looked toward a 
bodily, not a spiritual end — toward ease, and phys- 
ical comfort, and a more general leisure. Leisure! 
He knew that in the word leisure was implied a hope 
for all those things of the spirit for which he himself 
cared. But he saw how futile that hope was bound 
to turn out in the event. He himself had been 



In Quest of the Center 301 

poor. He had emerged from poverty by dint of a 
care for the things of the spirit. He had found 
leisure for the pursuit of those things. But though 
he had longed for them passionately, and had gone 
to those seats where by old tradition they were 
supposed to be found, he could not find them. Even 
so soon had they been driven into obscure corners 
and discredited in the general repute by the hu- 
manitarians in their impatience for the nearer ends. 
And he saw in himself a symbol of that future time 
for which they hoped, when all should have leisure, 
but when, alas, the traditions of that life of the 
spirit should have fled even from the obscure corners 
in which at last he had so fortuitously found it. 

The humanitarians had dominated the age. And 
if they had not kept it from being an age of luxury 
and an age of oppression — how could they with 
their own ideal so much akin to the ideal of the 
rich? — they had managed to discredit the disin- 
terested pursuit of humane wisdom. For our youth, 
however, who had struggled so long to orientate the 
chaos of his own vision of life, and whose horror 
was of the devotion of his spirit to an end which he 
could not square with the order of that vision, and 
who had learned to live without approval, content 
with despised causes, there was exhilaration in the 
sense that at last he had found what from the first 
he had so ardently longed for. He saw how right 
had been the instincts and vague desires with which 
he had years ago sought out the college, how right 
had been the rebellion of that little group of friends 
who had so stubbornly resisted to the end the 
temptation to fall into an easy and popular 
acquiescence. 



302 A Lover of the Chair 

He knew with bitterness that they had not wholly 
escaped its spell — that if it had won their open 
rebellion in failing to guide them whither they so 
longed to go, it had none the less by its constant 
pressure and by their exposure to every wind of 
chance influence bent them at last, unconsciously, 
to its own attitude. He saw how his best years had 
slipped by leaving his mind ignorant, unformed by 
that knowledge that he saw now to be the basis of 
human wisdom. He abhorred the vague terms in 
which he was condemned to do his thinking. But 
his bitterness was blunted by his exultation that 
however empty, however ignorant he had emerged, 
he was at last aware of that spiritual structure to 
which his own spirit had felt so vaguely akin, and 
in which he had so long put his rebellious faith. 

He carried his conception humbly to that obscure 
Grecian who in his earlier gropings had so irritated 
his humanitarian impatience, but whom he now saw 
as a repository of what was most worthy in human 
life. For in realizing that the spiritual structure, 
the humanizing product of men's thought and wis- 
dom, kept its tenuous life so precariously, and had 
its life at all only in men's minds, he saw how su- 
preme was the value of those men who shut them- 
selves — perforce, to-day, alas — aloof from the 
world, mastered the records of the past, wrote their 
few volumes, taught, or perhaps merely preserved 
by their example the tradition of the love of learn- 
ing. And there by that fireside, where he had so 
rebelled at those long ranks of books, he took up 
the discipline which the college had denied him, in 
pursuit of an end from which it had so nearly 



In Quest of the Center 303 

weaned him. And though the years were gone, and 
though his mind was formed in its own formlessness, 
yet he turned eagerly to its tardy cultivation. He 
began in reality the life of the spirit. For he was, 
in the triumph of his vision, at last justified of his 
abiding faith that there was something there to 
build ug3 



THE END 



4 



